


To The Last

by satellitescales



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 30,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26730982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satellitescales/pseuds/satellitescales
Summary: Montauk, a Dahl soldier, is stranded on Elpis with his entire legion. Left to die following a botched takeover. But there is something hiding beneath the moon's surface. Something bigger than anyone could have ever anticipated, and it is calling to them.This fic explores Borderlands: The Pre Sequel! from the Lost Legion's perspective.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	1. Lost Legion

Elpis is as shitty as everyone says it is.

Chalky peaks jut up through the horizon. On the bleak surface, sprawling plateaus of dusty moon rock are interrupted by soot-ringed craters. If you are unfortunate enough to wear an O2 Kit instead of a helmet, you’ll be greeted by the constant, maddening, and often debilitating stink of methane, ozone, and eggs.

Pandora rises fat in the sky, all its girth unimpeded by Elpis’ newly weakened atmosphere. The planet looks peaceful from this angle, all swirling clouds, green continents, and sandy coastlines. Compared to Elpis, it  _ is _ peaceful. The wildlife here is only always two things: disgusting and brainless. Spiderants even seem intelligent compared with what passes on Elpis for fauna.

There’s a chance I wouldn’t be so vindictive if we were here under different circumstances.

“They’re calling us the Lost Legion. Fools.” Our fearless leader grumbles, head bowed over an ECHOdevice. Apparently _ ,  _ she has an inside contact living on the moon, and  _ apparently _ , this inside contact can’t send backup, pull us out of this hole, or provide any kind of help. I say she’s either full of shit or being conned. Not to her face though.

I humor her. It looks bad if she’s talking to herself. Not that we all haven’t started talking to ourselves. Something in the air. “Who calls us that?” I say, scratching the side of my neck.

“Who do you think? Dahl,” Colonel Tungsteena Zarpedon stuffs the ECHOdevice into a strap on her hip. “You know what this means, Sergeant. If we are truly “lost” to them—”

“They aren’t coming back. I thought we figured this out weeks ago?”

Her pursed lips dip down. “I was under the impression we were not giving up so easily.”

“Who said anything about giving up?” This itch is  _ really _ bothering me. It crawls down my neck to my back. I grunt, trying to reach back in the clunky combat armor.

She watches me, hawkish and intent, square jaw set. “What’s bothering you, Sergeant?”

“Rash, chafing. Been a while since I’ve slithered out of the old suit,” I say with a shrug.

“The others have expressed similar concerns . . .”

“Too bad we didn’t pack our civvies.”

“I don’t think it’s that,” She says absently. Her hand drifts to her pocket, where she keeps the rock. She’s rarely ever not touching the thing. Before what the troops have started calling “The Crackening,” she found that weird crystal in the fissure. It’s about the width and length of her thumb, purple, and semi-translucent. She claims it’s eridium. I don’t believe fairy tales. But she doesn’t care, just keeps holding it and staring at it like it’s gonna save us.

“We can’t stay here much longer,” I tell her, withdrawing my hand from inside my suit. Dry, violet flakes stick out from under my fingertips. Is that from my back or was it there before?

“The Drakensburg is not salvageable,” She reminds me.

“I know that,” The natives have turned it inside out. They gutted the poor old ship in days.  _ Days _ . They scare me more than the wildlife. Even if we had the fuel, there isn’t enough ship left to get off the ground. “But we’re running out of food. And we won’t get off this rock if we stay here and starve.”

She looks contemplative. Her hand drops from the pocket and she turns to stare again out at the horizon. “We have the jets,” She says, ambivalent. “But where would we go? We don’t have nearly enough fuel to get out of the atmos—” She catches herself, “away from the moon’s gravitational pull.”

“So we stay on Elpis,” I try to sound nonchalant, but it hurts. I’ve got a sister on Promethea. I wonder if she’s heard about the so-called  _ Lost Legion _ . I had a locket with her face in it, but it left me when the Drakensburg was marooned. Ripped right off my neck. “Sure, the moon’s pretty messed up, but it’s not unlivable.”

The Colonel frowns again—that woman is always scowling to some degree—and glances over her shoulder at our meager camp, barely holding together. Her eyes rove over the stacked support beams, lean-to canvas tents, and scattered cargo boxes as if the answer is hidden somewhere in our ruin.

I know she isn’t looking at the camp, though.

“You want to go back to the dig site,” I say.

“There  _ is  _ something there. I feel it, it isn’t just a fissure,” She replies immediately.

“I can tell you one thing for sure, Colonel, it’s what got us stuck here. And it’s what popped the moon open like a melon. We don’t need more bad luck.”

“I thought you weren’t superstitious, Sergeant,” She says with a smile.

“Montauk.”

“Hm?”

“Call me Montauk. It’s my name. And I’m not superstitious, just careful.”

* * *

The medic, a sturdy young man called Boxer from Eden-6, hands The Colonel her gloves. He’s shorter than the rest of us, a bit younger, too, but he’s one of Dahl’s finest combat medics. All tanned olive skin and freckles, no bullshit. Also, he somehow manages to cut his hair in the low gravity and it looks good. The rest of us have given up trying to trim our hair. Mine’s just long enough now to be tied back, The Colonel's too.

The Colonel takes the gloves and slips them on. Her hands are raw and purple, the skin flakes off and smells of ash.

“Is it curable?” She asks gently.

Boxer pads an antiseptic-soaked cloth over my back. The violet rash there is bigger than my head and hurts like a bitch. “Honestly, Colonel? I have no bloody idea.”

“And you’re sure it’s affecting everyone?”

“I’ve seen nearly everyone here and they all have these burns.”

She looks hopeful, “They’re burns?”

The antiseptic eats at my flesh. I grit my teeth.

“They look like burns, radiation maybe. But, like I said: no clue. For now, just keep it covered and try not to touch it. I don’t know what this is, and I don’t want it spreading—er, spreading  _ more _ .”

The Colonel nods solemnly, eyes drifting up to the purple fog collecting in the infirmary. She wrinkles her nose at it and looks around the ramshackle room for a way to vent it. Sometimes she forgets Elpis doesn’t have enough atmosphere to vent anything into.

“Moon’s angry,” Corena says from the corner of the room. Her hands are bandaged to the elbow. Long, dark braids, head shaved on one side. The bald part of her skull is speckled with purple blots, they shine against her obsidian skin.

“The moon can’t be angry. It’s a moon,” I grunt. Not because I want to argue with the woman, but because I need something to keep me from crying out in pain.

“We tore her open, now we’re suffering,” She says with an indifferent shrug.

“Correlation does not equal causation,” The Colonel says, “but I think it’s time we go back there.”

I hear the wet click of Boxer opening his mouth to protest.

“This purple … gas is coming from the fissure we made. It’s most likely the thing that’s causing these rashes. Our recyclers are mixing this in with the oxygen we’re breathing. We should know more about it if we’re going to be inhaling it. That should be reason enough to go down there.”

Corena looks at her shoes. Boxer finishes the dressing on my back and tosses my shirt at me. I twist around and grab it.

“I’ll go with you,” I say. Boxer slaps me on the shoulder.

“Permission to speak like friends, Sarge?” He says bitterly.

“Permission . . . granted?”

“That’s the goddamn stupidest idea I’ve heard.”

The Colonel holds out her hands, “It is my plan. If you have any other ideas, I’m ready to hear them. I haven’t been sitting on my hands these past weeks, I’ve been busy like you, trying to find out what this is. Going back down into the fissure seems like our only viable option.”

“We could just leave this festering crater behind,” Boxer mutters.

“There isn’t enough space on our remaining ships to get everyone out,” The Colonel says.

“I suppose,” Boxer replies. He tosses a wad of stained gauze into a trash bag bolted to the wall. The used gauze floats lazily in the low gravity.

“I will stay,” Corena says resolutely, “someone will need to manage the camp.”

“I wouldn’t want my most decorated sniper anywhere else. Thank you,” The Colonel says. “You and the Corporals will be in command so long as I am gone. If we do not return, I trust you with my men.”

Corena tilts her head to the side, “Yes ma’am,” She replies. Cold. I don’t know what The Colonel sees in her.

The Colonel turns to me, “We leave tomorrow.” She glances at her watch to confirm that it isn’t already tomorrow and nods stonily. “I will get a crew prepared,” she ducks out of the tent, canvas billowing out behind her.

The infirmary is quiet without our leader. I shrug on my shirt. Corena scratches the side of her head beneath her O2 Kit.

“Stupid,” Boxer mutters under his breath.

“Why are you so against this?” I ask, turning to catch him scowling, shoving a combat knife into his boot.

“You don’t know anything about vaults, do you?”

“Vaults! Boxer, please.”

He glares, looking hurt. Corena scoffs, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You shouldn’t go after this stuff, it’s not a good idea. Not at all,” Boxer shakes his head.

“This isn’t a vault. It’s a hole in the moon. We were mining an unstable planet and caused a seismic event. All we’re doing is exploring the core of a moon.”

“You are so stubborn, can’t you see the signs? Purple crystals, illness,  _ dreams _ . Don’t tell me you haven’t had the dreams.”

“I’ve had the dreams, we’ve all had the dreams,” I say, waving my hand. I’d rather leave those behind when I wake up. “But vaults aren’t real. They’re fairy tales, ghost stories, fables created by drugged up miners on Pandora. If the vaults exist, why hasn’t anyone found one?”

“Typhon DeLeon,” Corena says quietly. I’m surprised she’d be the one to bring him up. Didn’t the Jakobs corporation make him up to sell guns?

“You’re both moon-crazy,” I say, standing.

“Just be careful, you big brute. I don’t want to have to patch all of you up when you get back.”

As I leave the infirmary, I wave to the two of them, “I’ll tell you if I find any untold riches.”

Boxer shakes his head. Corena sneers at me like she knows something I don’t.


	2. The Fissure

The farther we go into the fissure, the more wrong I realize I was.

I am not prepared. Not at all.

Physically, none of us were prepared. Our tactical gear was made and prepped for a hostile moon and some mining, not  _ snow _ . How snow forms down here is a mystery even The Colonel doesn’t understand. We’ve been down here weeks and haven’t seen a single snowfall, much less rain. The snow doesn’t melt, either. The O2 Kit keeps me breathing, but doesn’t keep me warm. I wish the Sergeant uniform came with a helmet.

Mentally, I don’t know. There are some things you just  _ can’t  _ prepare for. Even The Colonel’s shaken up. The dreams get worse the deeper we go into this crystalline hellscape. And I swear someone’s been following us. But it’s not a person. It is  _ not  _ a person.

“How long until we reach the center?” I ask The Colonel. We walk beneath a grand, indigo arch. I would think it to be made of rock if it weren’t for the perfect geometric angles and bands of light along the edges. The architecture is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The arches guide us deeper down, passing crystals bigger than a CQC powersuit growing on perfectly smooth outcroppings. This place wasn’t formed over years of seismic activity, it was built.

The Colonel spares a glance at her ECHOdevice. Her expression sours. With a resigned sigh, she tells me, “We should have reached the moon’s core an hour ago.” This information doesn’t surprise her.

“What? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Clearly something else is going on here.”

I laugh, harder than I intended to. The rash on my back aches. “ _ Clearly! _ ”

A few of the soldiers behind us look confused. The Colonel leans toward me. “I don’t want to frighten anyone until I know exactly what this is. Keep this information to yourself.”

I trust The Colonel enough to keep my mouth shut. We trek deeper and deeper into the moon’s center. All the while I am robbed of precious sleep by the dreams, becoming increasingly bothered by that tenacious rash, and racked by an inexplicable paranoia. I spend more time looking over my shoulder than the space in front of me.

After who knows how long, we set down to rest and investigate the surrounding area. Tents are constructed, floodlights flicked on, and we all feign normalcy, pretending the dreams don’t scare us beyond belief, pretending the fissure  _ itself _ doesn’t scare us beyond belief. I still feel eyes on my back wherever we go.

I find The Colonel outside one of the tents. Everyone else is asleep. I haven’t slept in three days. The worst part is, it doesn’t bother me. Add it to the list of things that are weird as hell down here.

She’s dressed down into just her fatigues. No gloves. She rolls the purple crystal between her fingers. The rash on her hands hasn’t changed since we left. It stops just above her wrists and the skin doesn’t flake off anymore. It looks like her hands have always been that way. Marbled with purple and magenta. Black fingernails. I pull my sleeves down. The rash on my back has grown to seep down my arms. It burns like tork venom.

“Colonel,” I say as I get close. She regards me with a marginal nod, still looking out at something. A platform on the other end of the pit.

“What does it want?” She asks, and her voice is quieted and small.

That’s when I see it.

Bone white exoskeleton, segmented into plates. It has an abdomen, shoulders, two legs, and two arms. But it is the most inhuman thing I’ve seen and I’ve been on this moon with its abominable creatures for a  _ while _ . Red, feather-like extensions protrude from the back of its arms and its head. Its head is angled and pale as the rest of it, featureless. Two wings sprout from where its clavicle would have been, feathers made of solid, planar structures and ending in spears of pink light.

_ You are not ready. _

I hear the voice in my brain. Echoing with the cadence of a thousand whispers. The sound is sure and ancient as a cliff face. And I stand at the edge.

_ Turn back. You will be watched. You will be protected. _

The Colonel turns to look at me, her face etched with fear. She’s young, I realize. A veteran Dahl soldier, a Colonel, and she’s only just older than Corena and me. The burden of ensuring our safety rests hard on her shoulders. The look in her eyes tells me one thing. We have to listen to whatever that thing was.

We both turn back, but it’s gone. Two large indents mark the snow where it stood.


	3. Watcher

When we reach the moon’s surface, I almost cry with relief. It’s the same cracked, broken camp we left. Tents barely holding on, debris everywhere, but it’s a sight for sore eyes. A day longer in that fissure and I might go moon crazy myself.

Corena and Corporal Best meet us as we climb out of the fissure. They’re comical next to each other. Corena—tall, dark, and serene as a mountain, with little energetic Best at her side, ruddy-faced and ready for action.

“What happened?” Best asks, hounding The Colonel, “Is everyone alright?”

“We’re fine,” The Colonel waves her hand dismissively, “the fissure is deeper than I thought. We didn’t reach the bottom.”

“Did you find anything?”

The Colonel shakes her head too fast to be convincing. I try not to look suspicious as I survey the camp for that  _ thing _ . I can’t help but notice The Colonel’s eyes flicking back and forth, doing the same.

“We will need to relocate underground as soon as possible to continue the exploration.”

Corena narrows her eyes, thinking. She’s always been smarter than the rest of us. Smarter than me, for sure. She guessed the vault connection and I brushed her off. I know now that she and Boxer were right about . . . something, at least. I may not understand more than half of what’s going on here, but I’ve seen that  _ thing _ , that  _ watcher _ before in drawings and heard of it in stories. The resemblance is uncanny. It’s an eridian guardian. And what do guardians protect?  _ Vaults. _

I should have listened to them. Now we’re in too deep. The Colonel is restless to get back down, but I don’t know. _ I don’t know _ . There’s something about that place. Something calling to me and pushing me away. Maybe it's the nausea, maybe it’s the rash, maybe the lack of sleep.

The Colonel sends me and the rest of the troop to the medical tent. Corena goes with her to discuss the move, Best hangs around to keep an eye on us.

“What the hell happened back there?” Best asks. She takes longer steps to keep pace with me, each one sending her floating upwards in the low-G. Our boots—standard-issue space combat boots from Dahl—automatically adjust to whatever gravity we’re in. They’re cheap, mass-produced, and aren’t the most reliable things, but they keep us from floating into orbit.

“Corena was right,” I tell her because it’s all I can manage. ‘ _ What happened?’ _ Where do I start?

Best laughs, “Isn’t that the truth? I’ve learned more about survival working next to her than I ever did in Dahl’s training programs.”

“No, I mean about the moon. Something’s wrong here.”

She looks at me funny. “Everything’s wrong here, Sarge. Go get patched up, get sleep, get fed. Oh, some of the techies figured out how to rig an oxygen field. We’ve got a few, with more on the way,”  _ How long were we gone? _ It didn’t feel like long, but time in the fissure is strange. Best pats me on the back. I try not to wince. “Be careful though, the moon stink can be a bit overpowering.”

* * *

The medical tent is enclosed in an oxygen field thanks to a thin metal generator. It can be toggled on and off and folded down for storage. The O2 Kit, detecting the faux atmosphere, recedes into itself, reduced to a metal disk on the back of my neck.

“Sergeant, back in one piece,” Boxer says idly from the tent to my right.

I nod, the movement stiff and mechanical. Boxer waves me inside. I follow him into the small tent, filled with crates of medical supplies scavenged from the Drakensburg. He gets to work disinfecting a pair of forceps. A polyethylene bag full of stained, purple gauze sits in the corner.

“You look like hell, though,” He says. “What was down there?”

“You were right,” I reply, unbuckling my shoulder armor, then the breastplate. The thermal shirt underneath is stained with sweat. “This was a stupid idea.” Gloves next. They come off with a shower of purple flakes.

Boxer stares at my hands, violet, knotted with veins and thick deposits of purple flesh. My nails fell off a while ago.

“What do you mean?” He asks slowly. Not looking away from my mangled hands, he slips on a pair of disposable gloves. I give him my hand when he asks for it.

“Something’s wrong down there. Something is really,  _ really _ wrong.” He turns my hand over, poking it and examining each finger. Eyes intent, mouth dipped down in a thin, worried line. “And I think we’re in too deep.”

He looks up at me, apprehensive. “Why do you think that?”

“Because part of me  _ has  _ to go back down there. There’s something in that hole and it’s calling to me.”

Boxer looks at me like I’m insane. I’m starting to think I might be. “Like a vault,” Boxer says carefully, voice drained of energy as if all his fears are being confirmed.

“Like a vault,” I repeat. “There was this . . . being . . . in there with us.”

“Montauk—”

“The Colonel saw it too. She’ll vouch for me. But it was there and it spoke or something . . . Something’s coming, Boxer. I don’t know what.” I don’t know where this feeling is coming from. But it’s strong, pulling at the edge of my mind.

He looks at the floor, dropping my hand. “I told her we should have left when we had the chance.”

“You believe me?”

“Yeah I believe you, why wouldn’t I? You’re thick but you don’t lie.”

“Thank you?”

Boxer sighs. “What do you think she’s gonna do?”

“She wants us to go back down, I think she feels the same . . . pull that I feel.”

“As much as my gut tells me no, I’ll follow The Colonel. Because I trust her not to get us killed. But you have to tell her that this vault business only leads one way, and that’s to ruin.”

I blink. “ _ I _ have to tell her?”

“She trusts you more than any of us.”

“No she doesn’t, I was just the first grunt to volunteer to enter that creepy fissure with her. Plus she gave control of the entire camp over to Corena and Best.”

Boxer snorts, “Corena is a good leader, but knowing someone’s strengths and trusting them are two different things. Trust me, she’ll listen to you.”

“We’ll see,” I say. Boxer wants me to convince The Colonel to leave the pit behind. I know that’s impossible because there’s no way I would leave the pit behind. It is magnetic.

Boxer replaces his gloves, throwing the soiled ones in the trash bag. “How’s your back?”

I chuckle darkly, “Worse,” I tell him, “a lot worse.”

* * *

Boxer sends me to the barracks with a cooling gel reserved for corrosion burns and a lot of thinly concealed concerned glances. I’m the worst he’s seen so far. He asked me about a hundred times if I had touched anything or was shot by anything because surely my condition couldn’t have progressed this fast. I didn’t tell him that I can’t sleep anymore.

As I lope through the low gravity, the stars bear down on me. Ever since I got out of that fissure, the galaxy seems far larger than I’d ever imagined. The sky is too deep, too full of life and light. Instead of staring off into space, I feel I am stuck beneath the underbelly of some massive creature. Hairs rise on the back of my neck.

Corena is waiting within the oxygen field at the makeshift barracks. She leans against one of the metal poles holding the whole thing up. Arms crossed over her chest, hair pulled up into a bun on the top of her head.

“Hey,” I say, lungs filling as I adjust to the artificial atmosphere, “I wanted to tell you—”

“What did you bring back?” Corena snaps, brown eyes pulling me apart. I am of the firm belief that lying is impossible when Corena is around. She has that effect on people, like a storm closing in.

“We didn’t  _ bring _ anything back,” I tell her. I try to push past her into the barracks so I can at least lie down. She holds her arm across the entrance, barring my escape.

“There’s a guardian in the camp.”

Hearing her say it makes my insides churn. She’s right. Of course she is. It hurts more than pretending everything that happened down there was a hallucination caused by whatever infection is eating me alive.

“It was down in the fissure with us. It’s harmless. It didn’t want us going deeper.”

“Which is why The Colonel wants us to go deeper.”

“Yeah, Corena, it’s probably hiding something,” I say, not intending to be so harsh. I sigh to clear my head.

“Something . . . eridian?”

“Probably,” I admit. “I’m sorry, you were right. I shouldn’t have brushed you off before.”

“Mhm. Zarpedon thinks it’s a vault.”

“She told you?”

Corena smiles slightly, “She trusts me too.”

“What do you think about all of this?” I ask, “This—whatever it is, the vault, the purple rash, now this . . . watcher thing.”

“I’m curious,” Corena replies plaintively, “but curiosity is dangerous. Sometimes curious things should be left to their mysteries.”

I wish I had the control to agree with her. She must detect the hesitation on my face. She gives me a look of familiar unease. “Goodnight, Sergeant,” She says, masking her wariness with a tight-lipped polite smile, “have you seen Best?”

I swallow, managing to mumble out, “Infirmary,” and brush past her. My ears ring with the pleads of some ancient thing, greater than all of this. I  _ have  _ to go back down there. It pulls on my spine and scrapes my teeth. Its whispers flutter through my skull. Like I left some vital part of myself down in that crevice.

The barracks are cool and dark, everyone is mostly asleep by now. Right. Sleep. That thing I don’t know how to do anymore. I float through the maze of bunks, trying to remember where mine was. Dazed, I kick a hand dangling off someone’s cot. When I turn to apologize, I see it.

It hovers a few centimeters off the ground, wings pulsing with red light. Bone white, red accents. In the dark it looks like some vestigial mix of human and insect. It doesn’t say anything, but I feel its presence in my shaking fingers. It gives me something resembling a nod and floats out of the barracks. Worst part is, it has to push the tarp aside to get out. I’m not hallucinating.

I find my cot in a thick stupor, crawl onto it, and proceed to lie in the dark, wide awake, for who knows how long. I haven’t slept in at least a week and a half. I’ve read about sleep deprivation, how quickly it picks apart your mind, yet I feel fine. That scares me.

At hour four of staring at the ceiling of the tent, Boxer stumbles into the barracks. I sit up instinctively. Boxer notices and squints.

“Sarge? That you?” He asks, walking past his cot to mine. I slide off and stand in front of him. “It’s true what they say about Dahl vets, they never sleep, do they?” He laughs, but he’s tired—eyes drooping, speech slowed..

“About that . . . I don’t need to sleep anymore.”

Boxer is either too tired or too jaded to be surprised. Resignedly, he asks, “Since you went in the fissure, that right?”

I nod. Boxer sighs. Oddly I feel a twinge of guilt, not liking the look of him upset. I’m scrambling to try and come up with something to say to him when he holds his hands up suddenly.

“Wait! I remembered,” He digs through his pockets, patting himself down to find something. “While you and The Colonel were out, I went on a salvage trip back to the Drakensburg. Nearly lost an arm to a lunatic with a buzz axe.” Finally, he finds it in a pouch on his arm. “We didn’t bring back much, but I found this.”

Boxer holds up a thin, silver chain with a locket on the end. My necklace. I take it from him and pop the locket open. My kid sister’s face grins up at me. I can’t help but smile back. “Boxer, shit, I don’t know how to thank you.”

“No need,” He grins, slugs me on the shoulder, “I’m just glad you’re back. But don’t lose it again, cause I quite like having both my arms attached to my body.”

I chuckle and pull him into a side-hug, wrapping my arm around his shoulders. “You don’t know how much this means to me,” I tell him.

He just laughs and shrugs me off him. “Alright, big guy, you may not need sleep—which is it’s own can of worms we’ll deal with later—but I do. I’ll see you after I get my six hours.”

“Six? You deserve twelve.”

“Try telling that to Corena,” He says, heading back to his bunk.

“Rest easy, Boxer.”

“Same goes for you.”

I smile to myself, slipping the necklace over my head where it belongs.

* * *

The first person awake is Corena. I follow her outside because the boredom is eating me faster than the rash. Lying awake on my hard cot in the oxygen field leaves me unused to the null gravity as I clamber outside. The O2 Kit forms a bubble around my head. I follow Corena to the armory tent.

“You’re up early,” She observes, not looking at me. She tugs on a pair of thick gloves and grabs a few clips of ammunition. She holds her sniper rifle with one hand. It’s nearly as long as her.

“I don’t sleep,” I say.

“Hm,” She doesn’t seem to care, but I know it’s making her gears turn. We lope to the edge of the camp, moving nearly soundlessly and weightlessly. “You have it the worst.”

She’s referring to whatever this rash-insomnia combo is. “I figured as much,” I say as Corena shoves the spare clips into my arms and loads her gun, setting it up on an outcropping of rock. She chambers a round.

“Do you know why?” She asks, barely peering through the scope before felling a monster a few hundred meters away. The winged, bat-like creature spins gracelessly to the ground out of view.

“I didn’t touch any glowing eridian artifacts when we were down there if that’s what you’re asking,” I tell her, only half-joking. 

_ CRACK _

She pops the tire of a moving moon buggy. I let air out between my teeth in surprise. She glares at me.

“What? That was impressive,” I point at the buggy in the distance, which careens out of control into a cliff face. In doing so I drop a clip. I bend to scoop it up before Corena gets mad. Her focus is on the scope when I straighten.

“I don’t think it’s killing you,” She tells the gun. With two more flashes and resounding bangs, she eliminates the survivors of the buggy crash. “It wants something from you.”

I don’t know what to say to that. Mostly because  _ how  _ do I respond to something like that? But also because a deeper part of me agrees with her. Whatever this is has something to do with whatever the fissure is. It isn’t radiation or slag sickness or some moon disease. It’s different. I don’t feel like I’m dying. I feel like I’m being pulled apart and stitched back together as something else.

I stay with Corena as the rest of the Legion awakens. She drains four more clips by the time she considers herself done. We walk side-by-side back to the makeshift armory. The ends of her thick black hair float around her face. The shaved side is starting to grow back in patches around the rash.

She nods at me to get my attention but not to make a scene. The overhead lights flash off the Dahl infantry implant on her forehead. Against her dark skin, it looks white. She jerks her head toward the middle of the camp. Across the camp, just beyond a stack of cargo crates, the  _ thing  _ watches. It’s amassed a smattering of onlookers. Marines standing in tight groups, pointing and speaking quietly. I’m surprised no one’s tried to shoot at it yet.

“That’s it, right?” She says quietly.

“Yeah.”

Corena nods, taking in all the visual information she can and filing it for later. Her stony, calculating silence irks me. I wish I could see inside her head. Or that she liked me enough to tell me what she’s thinking.

We drift back to the armory, attention still held by the silent watcher. Corena disassembles her gun and stows it away. When we head back to the center of camp, the watching thing is gone. Instead, The Colonel stands, flanked by Boxer and Corporal Bob—a grizzled veteran with a pyromanic streak. She doesn’t even need to say anything, we flock to her, forming a crowd.

“Dahl may have abandoned us, but we are by no means  _ lost. _ ” The Colonel says, not needing to project her voice much, given the coms. Still, her voice commands the camp. “We still have each other. This moon won’t kill us as Dahl intends. We will persevere.

“To do that, we need a goal. A goal less nebulous and daunting as “survive.”” I know where this is going before she says it. “When we were sent down here, to this moon, we cracked a hole into it. There is more to that fissure than meets the eye—far more. Our goal now is to move down there, explore the fissure, and find out what exactly it is we have unearthed.”


	4. Follow

Being underground is one experience.  _ Living  _ underground is an entirely different experience. Everything echoes too much or too little. Sometimes dirt or small rocks rain from above and we’re all left to wonder what caused it. On rare occasions, light filters in just right. Rays of orange and yellow spill down the outcroppings and crystal formations, but never enough to melt the snow.

At this point, it would be impossible to hide the giant crystal deposits, intentional structures, and vague references to ancient technology. So The Colonel makes no effort to hide the fact that we’ve entered some kind of ruins. It took a few days to settle into the notion that we are most likely in the presence of a vault, but everyone took to it with little resistance. Something about being stranded on a dying hunk of rock makes people desperate for anything. Even promises of dangerous ancient technology and a terrible monster guarding it—if the legends are to be believed.

“Okay,” Best says, “we open the vault and find endless riches. What’s the first thing you do with your new wealth?” 

We sit in a makeshift common area on upturned cargo boxes. Corena and The Colonel share one large crate. The Colonel rolls the purple stone between her fingers. Best sits on the ground, one leg extended, nearly touching Corena’s foot, she rests her arms on the other. Boxer sits on the same crate I do. The violet rash has crawled up my face, reaching the corners of my mouth already. Boxer pretends he isn’t staring at it and I pretend it doesn’t bother me.

“We don’t know if it’s a vault,” I say.

“It’s a hypothetical, Montauk. Core, what would you do?”

Corena looks surprised. She tries to shrug off the nickname, but it’s clear it caught her off guard. Best’s mouth quirks up in a grin, drinking in Corena’s attempts to look cool and collected. “I do not need riches,” She mutters.

Best throws her head back and groans. “It’s! A! Hypothetical! Boxer, don’t let me down.”

Boxer tilts his head to the side, thinking. “I would buy enough ships and whatnot to get us all off the moon . . . then anything left over I would send to the saurian research facility I used to work at back home. Aside from the Jakobs estate on the other side of the moon, there isn’t a ton of money on Eden-6. We— _ they _ could use it.”

“Good answer!” Best cries gratefully. “See, Montauk, Core—Boxer knows how to hold a conversation.”

I wouldn’t expect anything less from Boxer. His heart’s bigger than himself. Of course he used to work for a wildlife center, and of course he would donate endless alien riches to it. He’s the kindest person I know.

“I can hold a conversation,” Corena says defensively.

Best kicks Corena’s foot. “Please do! That’s what I’ve been trying to do this entire time.”

Corena purses her lips, then she does something odd. She apologizes. “I’m sorry. This situation we’re in . . . it’s taking time to get used to.”

“Tell me about it. A vault could be right  _ here _ , under our feet.”

“It might not be a vault,” I add. Best rolls her eyes.

“If it is a vault, we need to be careful. No one knows why the eridians built them,” Corena says.

“I’m careful,” Best assures her.

“I’m not doubting your abilities. But, don’t start thinking you’re a vault hunter.”

Best smiles, lips curling upwards like a cat. “No promises.”

“You are a madwoman,” Corena chides, but her face betrays the fondness she feels.

Best snaps her head to me, eyes stuttering on my mutilated chin. I force down the waves of insecurity that come with her surprise. I see it on everyone’s face now. They see the rash before they see me.

“If we don't know for sure that this is a vault,” She says, “can’t we just ask The Watcher?”

Boxer stiffens at my side at the mention of our alien intruder.

“What was that?” The Colonel turns, fingers curled around the crystal.

“The Watcher. You know, the guardian thing with wings, watches everyone, appears and disappears all the time . . .”

The Colonel nods in recognition, “The Watcher. . .” She repeats experimentally. “It’s a good sentiment, but I doubt it would answer any questions. It hasn’t spoken since it told us to . . . well,  _ not _ stay down here,” She adds sheepishly.

“Do you think it’s a vault?” Bests asks pointedly.

The Colonel looks down at the crystal again. “I am not certain, but—” She meets my eyes, the only person not to stop at the purple rash eating my face, “something  _ is _ down here.”

She says it to me because I  _ know _ . I hear it, feel it, sense it, whatever. It’s a presence, a movement, a shifting of atoms in my periphery. Whispers on the drafts that flutter down from the surface. A gravitational weight pulling me towards the moon’s core. Something is down there and it knows we’re here. I can’t tell if it wants to kill us or welcome us.

“The architecture suggests eridian origin,” Corena says, smooth voice cutting through the anxiety The Colonel and I built up, “but it doesn’t have to be a vault. The eridians were an entire race of beings. They did more than build vaults.”

“Why do you know so much about eridians, anyway?” I ask.

Corena shrugs, “I was an interplanetary history major.”

“So that’s how you ended up in the Dahl infantry,” I laugh. Corena looks halfway to tearing my head off.

“I doubt you had higher education,” She says venomously.

“You’d be right. Grew up on Promethea. Our city was in the middle of a recession and local education budgets were slashed. My choices were either to join the Crimson Lance or go off-world and enlist for the Corporate Wars,” I say. Corena looks horrified.

“Why didn’t you just go to a different city?” Boxer asks.

I shake my head, “You haven’t been to Promethea.”

“We may be stranded on a moon,” Best says, “but you dodged a bullet. I heard bad things about the Lance over the ECHOnet. Like, police-state bad, holding-civilians-hostage bad.”

“Atlas has always been heavy-handed and morally loose,” The Colonel adds, shaking her head. “I knew they had their men down on Pandora and Promethea, but I didn’t know how bad it was.”

“Trust me, it’s bad.” I tell them, hand subconsciously drifting to my locket. Hopefully she’s safer than I am.

Best’s eyes go wide. I’m tempted to tell her it’s not  _ that _ bad. She looks horrified, as if militarized corporate takeovers are anything new. Then I realize she isn't looking at me. I follow her gaze over my shoulder.

The Watcher stands in the snow, less than a meter from The Colonel. She shoves the crystal back in her pocket like she’s been caught doing something heinous. The Watcher takes no notice, moving its head in a slow and precise motion to see all of us.

_ Follow. _

Boxer holds his head in his hands, staring anywhere but at The Watcher. Corena shoots up from her seat, refusing to look away.

Its voice connects the dots in my subconscious. Easing me back together like a broken bone fusing in place. Its presence bathes my nerves in warmth. Yet somehow I know its words are not for me. The Colonel stands, slowly getting to her feet. The only sound is the humming of The Watcher’s wings.

_ You are ready. There is much for you to see. _

Best whips out her sidearm. She aims down sights at The Watcher. It flicks its long, clawed hand and Best’s pistol flings across the camp, landing at the feet of a group of stunned marines.

_ Alone. _

The Colonel holds her hand out to discourage any more violence. She turns, looking over her shoulder at us. With a determined nod and a single glance that speaks volumes, she follows The Watcher down, down into the fissure.


	5. Our Mission

Without The Colonel, we are fractured. Corena and Boxer managed last time, but this time is different, uncertain. Corena maintains some control over the troops, but unease is the swiftest breaker of organization. Soon we stop sending scouting parties out to look for her, to find  _ anything _ . Soon we stop leaving the camp altogether.

Snow piles on the tops of the tents, which I am in charge of forming groups to shovel off. Corena seals the captain’s tent, preserving it for The Colonel’s return. Best is not as optimistic.

“It ate her,” Best tells me, with enough manic certainty I’m almost convinced she saw something.

Instead, I reply, “How? It doesn’t have a mouth.”

“It talked, didn’t it?”

“Was that  _ talking _ ?” I ask her. She doesn’t reply because she doesn’t know.  _ I  _ don’t know.

She stabs her shovel in the snow and leans against a crystalline column. Sighing a puff of hot air, she rubs her arms to keep warm. I decide to break with her. As I set my shovel next to hers, she watches me intently.

“Montauk, what color are your eyes?” She asks.

I blink. “Brown.”

Best winces. “They didn’t glow before, either?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

She shoves off the wall, grabs her shovel. “Go find a mirror. And see Boxer while you’re at it.” Before I can ask any more questions, she leaves me, ducking into Corena’s tent. I head to the infirmary, avoiding eye contact as I go.

“Montauk,” Boxer grins when I enter. I wish I felt like the man that makes him smile like that. “Everything alright?”

“Corporal Best said there’s something up with my eyes, do you have a mirror?”

“Probably,” Boxer says, no questions asked. He digs around in a crate, finally producing a tiny handheld mirror. Grime cakes the edges, along with a dubious orangish stain on the corner.

I take the mirror and hold it up to my face. Boxer watches me quietly as I pull my eyelid up to see closer. Not that I need to, it’s pretty obvious. My irises are electric blue. They cast a dim light onto my eyelashes. I put my finger up to my eye. In the mirror, blue light shines on it.

“I’m a goddamn glow stick,” I mumble, lowering the mirror. Not to mention that nearly half my face is covered in those stubborn rashes. “How long has  _ this  _ been a thing?”

Boxer frowns in that little concerned way he always does when I complain. He leans forward on his tip-toes, using my forearms for leverage to examine my eyes. I fight the urge to look away. The closeness of our faces is a stark contrast to the bitter chill of outside. I take a few deep breaths to cool the heat in my face.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Boxer muses. “Look up, will you?” I obey. He shifts on his feet to get a better look. He sighs and draws away. “I don’t know how to help,” He admits, “I can’t shake the feeling that this has something to do with . . . The Watcher.”

“You aren’t alone there,” I grumble.

“Does it hurt?”

“No, same as the rash. Hurts my pride, though.”

Boxer hits my arm. “You’re still Montauk. Nothing can change that, not even whatever this is.” He tries to smile but it wavers. “I don’t think I can do anything for your eyes, or the rash. I wish there was some way I could help.”

“I wish I knew how this ended.”

“Ended?”

I shrug, “It’s not killing me, so what is it doing? I don’t sleep anymore, I barely eat, my skin is purple and now my eyes glow? What’s the end goal here?”

“Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out,” He says, like the optimist he is. I’m touched this man would even consider me his friend at all. We are two stark opposites. I am a Dahl soldier to the core, muscled, disciplined, and willing and able to shut off my brain to follow orders. There’s little tying me down and even less to stop me from doing something stupid in the name of duty. Boxer, on the other hand, is a caring and open soul, a lover of wildlife. He’s generous and strong-willed and became a combat medic to help people because it’s what he  _ wants  _ to do. I don’t have a single idea of what he sees in me.

* * *

The impromptu mess hall—three tents stitched together to make a massive atrium—is where most socialization happens now. We’ve all formed our little groups, sectioning ourselves off, as if it will keep our grief tiny and localized. The Colonel’s absence is less evident and dreadful when I keep to my close circle of friends. With them, I can pretend we’re on a mission without The Colonel. When I see another soldier's eyes, even the marines from my old unit, I’m reminded that she is what brought us together. Now we’re all waiting with growing unease for her to return.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Best asks.

I shake my head, “Not exactly. And I don’t want to risk throwing it back up again.” Another new development. Only a few days after my eyes changed color and began glowing, I lost my appetite. When I didn’t eat for three days straight, I tried forcing some food down. It came back up within the hour. I’ve been trying to feed myself off and on, but I can barely keep anything down. I’m losing weight fast.

“Ugh, TMI.”

_ “Again? _ ” Boxer asks, giving me a worried look across the table. As if it’s  _ my fault _ I can’t hold anything down.

“It’s not that big of a deal, I’m not hungry anyway.”

“First sleeping, now food,” Corena says, mostly to herself.

“Alright well, don’t starve yourself, Sergeant. But also don’t ask me to hold your hair back,” Best adds with a well-meaning smile.

“No need, I’m probably going to cut it,” I say, raking my fingers through the tangled mess of a ponytail my hair has become. In the artificial gravity, it goes down my back.

Boxer looks personally offended, “I like the long hair,” He says defensively.

“It’s getting hard to maintain.”

“Why don’t you brush it out? I can tie it back if you like.”

“I didn’t pack a brush. I’m not used to this much hair.”

Best watches us argue with an amused smirk, eyes dancing between Boxer and me.

“Well—” Boxer looks around, eyes settling on Corena across the table, “Corena probably has a brush. You do, don’t you? Can I borrow it, detangle this mess?”

Corena purses her lips. “I might have something.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll get it to you after dinner.”

Best, detecting the end of the conversation, shovels the last bite of her MRE into her mouth and holds up her hands: signal for us lowly footsoldiers to silence—she is going to speak. She gives us all reassuring looks, mutely telling us that what she has to say is worth the wait—the decidedly awkward wait while we watch her chew and swallow her foot. Corena kicks back, resting her legs crossed on the table. I move my arms away from her boots.

“I was out shoveling snow,” Best starts, “you know, breaking my back with that shovel like I always do.” Which is true, Best has taken over most of the snow shoveling. Not for any particular reason except that everyone else has assumed other roles in maintaining the camp.

“Which we appreciate,” Corena cuts in.

Best shoots her a knowing smile, “I know  _ you _ appreciate the work I do around here. I was making sure Montauk knew I was picking up his slack.”

“Slack? I’m not slacking, I’ve been repairing the oxygen field generators.”

Best ignores me. “So I’m busting my ass out there with the snow, when all of a sudden, all hundred-something kilos of Corporal Bob saunters up to me with a blowtorch. He tells me he’s been waiting to use that thing, pulls the ripcord—or whatever, I don’t know how it works—and melts all the snow in  _ seconds _ .”

Boxer groans, “I was wondering why he hadn’t stopped talking about the blowtorch. I’m sure he sleeps with it.”

“Honestly? I think you’re right.”

Corena leans forward and taps Best’s forearm, “Tell them about the—”

“Oh right! I saw him do this and I’m about ready to grab a blowtorch myself, but we’re removing the snow from the tops of the tents. The  _ canvas tents _ . Anyways, Bob’s grinning at me all smug, singing the praises of his little flamethrower, when all of a sudden, the marine who was sleeping inside comes out. He’s soaking wet. All the melted snow went straight through the canvas and gave the poor saps inside a shower. Luckily I wasn’t the one holding the blowtorch.” Best grins.

I am grateful for these small moments. Grateful our bleak camp can still hold some form of camaraderie.

The Corporal himself bursts into the mess hall. At my side, Corena waves to him, he doesn’t notice. “Speak of the devil,” She says. Best twists to see him.

Bob waves his arms like a madman and soon all conversation in the mess hall hushes. “She’s here!” he shouts, “She’s back! Colonel Zarpedon—she’s back!” He continues, but his voice is swallowed by a raucous chatter as everyone starts talking, stands, or breaks for the exits all at once.

Corena swings her legs off the table and stands in one swift, practiced motion. I shoot up, bench screeching on the prefab plastic. Boxer and Best are close behind us as we file outside. All around us, O2 Kits activate and bubble around our heads, detecting the null atmosphere.

At the edge of the camp, flanked by the hovering, pulsating Watcher, is Colonel Zarpedon. Her clothes are as untouched as the day she left. Even her hair is the same length. The violet rashes on her hands glow, lilac streams of light slipping past her short gloves. In one hand she carries an ornate, distinctly eridian scepter. One end has a glowing purple sphere encased in a dark, slaty stone inlaid with eridium. The other end, the one pointing to the sky, is tipped with a half-moon blade of glowing stone. Black smoke trails from the end in lazy, inky streams.

Her eyes are a grotesque promise of my future. They’re burned completely white, emitting a harsh, pale light. Sharp, purple veins sear out from her eye sockets, up her forehead, down her cheeks, across the bridge of her nose. She blinks and the light illuminates the veins in her eyelids.

Something pulls at my gut, trying to get me away.  _ This is wrong _ , the instinct tells me _ , bad, bad, bad, wrong. _ I become starkly aware of the height and power of The Watcher. It is a predator, and my flight instinct is screaming at me to get the hell away from it.

But I can’t stop. Once I’m walking towards her, my feet continue on their own, taking me closer to The Colonel and The Watcher, closer to the cool, calm well yawning in my skull. There’s an invisible aura about her, something that soothes my nerves and fills me with a sense of complete, undeniable purpose.

The Colonel’s fingers twitch on the staff. She looks to The Watcher for a moment, then addresses the entire Lost Legion, awaiting her voice with bated breath.

“It is a vault.”

Four words we all dreaded and hoped for and feared and now wish were untrue. But the sureness of our leader expels any doubts. Along with the imposing three-meter tall alien standing next to her.

“I have seen what is inside the vault. The rumors are true, vaults contain immense power. Power so great it must not be released. If the vault’s powers fall into the wrong hands it will start a chain of events that will destroy the universe as we know it. Vaults are real and they are volatile and extremely dangerous.

“I know what happens if this vault is opened and its bounty is torn out. It will destroy Elpis and everyone living on it. It will tear the moon apart, worse than the Crackening, worse than anything you could ever imagine. Opening this vault will put a sequence of events in motion, events that lead to more destruction. There are vaults all over the galaxy, some containing worse horrors than even I have seen.” She pauses to let her words sink in.

“Once a vault is opened, it is only a matter of time before the others are opened as well. This—more than anything we have ever fought for—is our utmost priority. We must protect the vault and in turn, keep the universe safe.

“I cannot ever hope to convey the gravity of this mission to you. You have not seen what I have . . .” She touches her cheek, just below her right eye, with her free hand. An unfathomable sadness crosses her face. The sadness of a woman who looked into the void and saw how small and fragile this life of hers is. “But you must understand, what we are doing now will benefit others for millennia. So long as the vaults stay closed, humanity can continue to live in the stars.

“This does mean,” The Colonel says heavily, “that we will not see our families again. We will not leave this fissure again. I know this will be difficult to accept, it is for me, but it must be done. If we do not stay and protect the vault, the vault’s power will fall into the hands of a tyrant and our entire universe will be dust.

“Our small sacrifice will produce ripples throughout time. So long as we keep the vault a secret, keep it’s long-hidden horrors away from our friends and families and homes, we will be contributing to a greater good. I ask all of you now to take action and to join me in my vigil, protecting the universe from certain and absolute destruction.”


	6. The Vigil

The vigil put purpose into our lives. We weren’t just the Lost Legion, we were the protectors of the vault. Quickly the vigil  _ became _ our lives. It wasn’t a new, strange thing we had to deal with. It was purely what we were doing. And just like any other mission, any other operation over the years, we fell into a routine.

Occasionally, small scouting teams will leave for the moon’s surface. They aren’t gone long, but not all members of the team come back. It isn’t always an animal attack or a shootout with the locals. Some simply cannot handle being stuck down in the fissure and leave. When the scouts do get back, they all report the same things—Elpis’ terrifying wildlife is making a resurgence, the locals are still hostile, and Pandora is still in the sky. Which, when you think about it, could be a good thing  _ or  _ a bad thing.

Our camp becomes more lived in, more familiar. I quickly develop enough familiarity to walk from one end of the camp to the other with my eyes closed (unless the snow piles up too high). We fall into something resembling normalcy, doing what we were trained to do as Dahl soldiers: adapt, take orders, and don’t ask too many difficult questions.

* * *

6 MONTHS INTO THE VIGIL

Boxer drags the brush over my scalp again. We’ve sat and done this so many times that the brush he “borrowed” from Corena is full of my knotted brown-grey hair. He always complains that I wriggle around too much, so I let him put his free hand on my back to keep me still. I try not to think about how warm his hands are. Is my skin really that cold?

“What’s this?” Boxer asks, touching the bone-white relic on my shoulder. It’s curved and jagged like the branch of an ancient tree, but solid, dense, and greyish. Shot through with white lines. I’ve looped rope around it, tying it to my armor.

I don’t know what it is. I tell him and he makes a noise of wordless disapproval. I can picture the look on his face—eyes cast to the side, brows drawn close, lips pursed.

“The Watcher gives me things?” I say.

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“I don’t know why it keeps giving me these . . . relics. Or, I don’t know,” I scratch my temple, where the rash is beginning to flake. “Sometimes it will just float up to me and hand me things.”

“And you take a mysterious artifact from this alien? No questions asked?”

“Yeah, I—”  _ How do I describe this? _ “I have to. I don’t know what it is, but I’m drawn to them. I have to keep them . . . near me.”

“Montauk?”

“Yes?”

“That’s bloody strange.”

I laugh, and it feels better than all the times I’ve tried to rationalize it to myself. Whatever the hell is going on is beyond strange. It’s nice to have someone point that out. More often than not, I am left to sink into the strange. I worry it’s making me into someone I don’t recognize. The fact I still have the conscience to agree that yes,  _ that is bloody strange _ , means I’m not completely gone.

Boxer sets the brush down and reaches around me for the table at my knee. His thick, tan bicep brushing my waist as he does so. I realize, suddenly and starkly, that it’s been a while since I’ve had . . . whatever this is? These tiny, quieted, calm moments. Two people and a mutual agreement to exist in the same place together. It fills me with a familiar deja vu—longing for a time not my own, for memories I don’t have.

He grabs the hair ties off the table and withdraws, tapping me on the shoulder. “Did you hear me?”

I blink, “Shit, sorry. What did you say?”

Boxer snorts. I can practically hear the eye roll. “You want the usual?”

“You know I don’t care how my hair looks. I just—”

“Don’t want it to get in your eyes, I know. I was only making sure.”

“Are you disappointed? You want me to be picky? I can be picky.”

Boxer chuckles, “Please no. I’m still amazed you haven’t caught on to the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Oh, I have,” I reply with a grin. He doesn’t see because he’s sitting behind me. “But you care about this hair more than I do. Without you here to fuss about it, I’d cut it all off.”

“I thought you just liked my company,” Boxer says smugly.

“I—I do, but, you know. I mean—”

He hits me lightly on my back. “I’m messing with you. Now hold still for a sec . . .”

* * *

11 MONTHS INTO THE VIGIL

I find The Colonel in her tent, one of the rare times she’s alone. The Watcher follows her everywhere now. She sits on the edge of her cot, scepter over her lap. She blinks up at me, eyes temporarily blinding me in the dim.

“It appears we are in the same boat,” She says, hovering a hand near her face so it’s washed white by her eyes. Her hand drops to the handle of the scepter.

“I wish I knew what caused it,” I reply with a laugh. It’s flat, with less effort than I intended. I’m trying to get an answer out of her rather than sympathize. It’s shitty but it’s the truth. She’s been in the vault, she should know  _ something _ .

It strikes me odd that she doesn’t immediately respond. She’s always been so sure, analytical; the lighthouse pulling us through the darkness. Seeing her now, lost, abandoned by her superiors, and tangled up in an eridian mess bigger than herself, I can tell it weighs on her. I step into her tent, letting the flap flutter closed behind me. I stand across from her.

“What did you see in there?” I ask. Right to the point. I can’t wait any longer. I have to know. It has to have at least some connection to whatever is happening to me. Plus my chest hurts for some reason. It’s been bothering me for days, hurting more when I cough or breathe too hard. Something tells me it has everything to do with my transformation.

“I already told you all,” She says, keeping my gaze. Or at least I think she is. “Destruction. Complete and total . . .” She trails off. “There are things—monsters—kept inside the vaults. They are powerful beyond belief, and if they’re released, they will destroy everything in their path. Even planets. Once even one vault is opened, it causes a chain reaction, a sequence of events, leading to inevitable ruin.”

The Colonel can tell I’m not satisfied. I’m not even trying to mask my disappointment. There has to be  _ something _ . Anything that can help me. That can explain what is going on.

“This is bigger than us,” She says, “and maybe that’s why you and I are being . . . affected like this. But I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. The Watcher doesn’t have all the answers. But I do know one thing: the vaults have to stay closed.”

* * *

1 YEAR INTO THE VIGIL

Bob wasn’t gone for long. I’m surprised. Everyone else has told tales of how hostile the locals are, I can’t imagine they would be comfortable parting with the copious amounts of alcohol he came back with. I ask him how he got it. He just pats his flame turret and grins beneath his beard. Best and I help him haul the crates to the back of the camp, behind the mess hall.

“What is it like up there?” Best asks, setting the last crate down with a huff. Like me, she hasn’t yet ended up in the rotation for a surface scouting mission. I’m not particularly upset about it, but I can tell she feels left out.

Bob looks off in the distance for a moment, gathering the right words. “Shitfest,” He says finally and nods, satisfied with his description. “But we have booze now, so,” He shrugs like it’s the end of the conversation.

“Are there people up there?” Best leads. She follows Bob as he ducks into the mess hall.

“Yup.”

“And . . .?”

“And they’re moon-crazy. Hey, woah! Did you set this up?”

The mess hall is decorated as much as possible given our limited supplies. In the center of every table is an empty helmet filled with glowing crystals. Legion banners hang on the metal poles that serve as rafters. At the front—the first thing you see when you walk in—is a sign fashioned from the letters carved off our destroyed ships.  _ HAPPY CORENA _ . We realized too late that the only  _ Bs _ and  _ Ds  _ were on the outer hull of the Drakensburg, which was too far.

Best’s face sours, “It’s all we could manage, given the . . . circumstances.”

She’s been worrying like this all day. Since we couldn’t spell out the word  _ birthday _ , she’s been convinced Corena won’t like it. I told her that if Corena had any standards, she wouldn’t be hanging out with me  _ or _ Best. Best punched me in the shoulder, but I think it helped a bit.

Bob is nodding his head, taking in the dressed-up tables and scavenged decor. “I like it,” he concludes.

Best pushes past him to scoop some stray crystals back into the nearest helmet, “It’s not for  _ you  _ to like.”

“I’m invited, aren’t I?”

“Well, yes. But it’s . . . it’s  _ for _ Core.”

“She’s going to love it,” I tell Best. Bob backs me up with a  _ yeah, he’s right _ but doesn’t meet my gaze. I don’t blame him. I’ve become a chilling sight. Glowing eyes, skin barely anything but a streaky violet mess. And I’ve lost a ton of weight from the fact that I still cannot keep any food down. It doesn’t bother me that I’ve become the eyesore of the Legion. Best, Corena, Boxer, and The Colonel can still meet my eyes, which is all I care about.

Best’s shoulders drop. I hope she’s coming to the conclusion that worrying this much won’t help. She offers Bob and me a slight smile. “If she doesn’t, I’m blaming you two.”

“I’ll take that burden,” I reply with a chuckle. 

Corena returns from her scouting mission dog tired. She drops off the guns she salvaged and attempts to retreat to her tent. Following the plan, I find her and suggest we get a drink in the mess hall. She shakes her head, muttering about how I’m always bothering her—par for the course—but follows me anyway.

I hold the tent curtain open for her. She frowns at my anticipatory excitement, stepping carefully inside. Her eyes widen first with confusion, then she registers what’s going on, and glances around. Not all of the Lost Legion, but most of us, fill the rows upon rows of tables. The marines cheer when she enters. Corena looks like a deer in the headlights, trying to comprehend where all this celebration came from and why it’s happening  _ for her _ .

Her frightened expression disappears when Best races across the hall and slams Corena into a hug. She pulls back, eyes searching Corena’s dark, smooth face for a reaction.

“Do you like it?” Best squeaks.

“I . . .” Corena fumbles, “this is all for me?”

“Yeah, it’s your birthday,” Best says. At that, the nearby tables erupt into more cheers, setting off a chain reaction that ends in a badly-timed, horribly disorganized, shouting version of the happy birthday song, complete with clapping, wolf-whistles, and fists banged on tables. Corena was out for a while. Bob’s alcohol stash wasn’t going to go untouched forever.

Best takes Corena’s hands and leads her to an open space cleared at the center table. I slide in between Bob and Boxer—Corena and Best take the bench opposite us.

“How old are you?” Bob asks, handing Corena a bottle of the dubious liquor.

Corena takes a pause, eyes narrowing as she realizes she didn’t stop to ask herself that. She sets the bottle down and begins counting on her fingers, Bob laughs.

“I don’t keep track of these things,” She says defensively, giving up on trying to calculate.

“What was the last birthday you celebrated?” Boxer asks.

Corena thinks, “I was . . . nine years old.”

“Oh, great, so she’s  _ at least _ ten,” Bob says.

She rolls her eyes. “You didn’t have to do this for me,” She says sheepishly and takes a sip of her drink. Her eyes shoot open wide and she has to choke it down. Sputtering, wiping her mouth, Corena demands to know what it is.

Bob grins, “It’s some of the local brew,” he gestures with his own bottle, “enjoy it! I worked hard for this.”

“It  _ tastes  _ like engine solvent.”

“You wanna try it out in one of the fighter jets?” Bob offers, laughing with his eyes, “It might work,” he says thoughtfully, and, horrifyingly, takes another lop sip. I turn down the next bottle that’s passed my way.

The Colonel eventually joins the festivities. I invited her and she told me she had business to attend to with The Watcher. I can’t tell if she’s done with said business or not because when she shows up—in the middle of Corena’s sniper squad belting out an off-key rendition of  _ The Tumultuous Tale of the Space Vixens _ —The Watcher stands beside her. I wave her over.

Boxer sits next to me, trying not to let on that he knows the raunchy ballad. We’re squished so closely on the packed bench I can feel his foot tapping to the rhythm.

The Colonel joins us, The Watcher staying on the other side of the tent. She, like Corena, receives cheers and applause. The Colonel waves the paise away with a bow of her head as she takes the open seat next to Best. Bob demands embarrassing stories from Corena’s early days in the Dahl infantry.

“Any “embarrassing stories” would only exist because of my awkwardness as a lieutenant,” The Colonel says, accepting a bottle from Bob. She sniffs it, wrinkles her nose, and hands it back. “Corena was the best in her recruit group. I handpicked her for my colonel’s legion.”

“The best sniper on the Drakensburg was also a prodigy recruit, who wouldda guessed?” Someone shouts. Corena attempts to hide a smile behind her hand. “Oy! What’s your kill count?”

“My kill count . . .” Corena muses, taking a pull of her beer. “You know, I think a guy from the Dahl Statistics Division once said it was more than the population of Eden-3 . . .” She trails off, grinning. The marines call bullshit, but her sniper squad backs her up. The shouting match quickly unravels into drunken laughing and jokes.

With more encouragement, Corena tells stories from her training days as a fresh-faced recruit. The Colonel occasionally cuts in with extra information. I never knew they went back so far. Best eats it all up, gasping, laughing, and occasionally even stopping to clap. She stares up at Corena with the wonder and fondness one reserves for art or traveling at lightspeed for the first time. This look vanishes every time Bob starts to talk, and Best rolls her eyes or pokes fun at how quickly he’s succumbing to the mystery liquor. I doubt there’s any ill will between the two. Bob laughs at all her jokes—though he laughs at everything—and grins when she shakes her head and stifles a laugh at his antics.

As everyone leaves the mess hall for the night—stumbling to the barracks or their tents—Corena and Best stand by the haphazard  _ HAPPY CORENA _ sign. Best talks animatedly, face flushed. Corena says something that stops Best mid-sentence. She grabs Corena’s shoulders, pulling her down and kissing her firmly on the mouth.

Bob drags me out into the cold, laughing and fiercely telling me about the time he made roasted rakk wings using only his flamethrower and a pepper shaker. At least I assume that’s what he’s telling me. His sentences drop off and every other slurred syllable is completely unintelligible. I keep him company with appropriate _ uh huhs _ ,  _ yeahs,  _ and  _ mhms _ . 

The Colonel sees him talking my ear off and chuckles to herself, waving as she ducks into her tent.

We stop at the edge of the camp, standing together at the top of a ramp leading further into the fissure. His boots leave massive, winding prints in the snow. Bob grabs my shoulder, hand roughly scraping one of my relics. I suppress the sudden urge to shove him off me. Some deep, primal anger struck me when he nearly tore off the relic in his drunken stupor. I try not to dwell on it.

Bob stares me dead in the face, a harsh seriousness befalling his features. His cheeks and the tip of his nose are lit up blue from my eyes. “Montauk,” he says firmly, and  _ wow _ his breath stinks of whatever that “alcohol” was. “Montauk, you’re a good friend. You’re . . . yeah, you’re a good friend. You wouldn’t lie to me.”

“I would not.”

“Yeah,” he nods resolutely, still slurring, “yeah, so tell me . . . tell me and be  _ honest _ . Honesty, Monny, you know what that is?”

I sigh and humor him. “Yes, Bob, you can trust me.”

“The flame turret.  _ My _ flame turret. It only shoots one flame, I was thinking—that’s not enough . . . Monny—my brother in arms, my  _ friend _ —should I add more flames?”

“Yes, more flames are the way to go. Hell, make it four flames—go wild.”

Bob touches his temple, “You are a genius, Monny.”

“Don’t call me Monny.”

“A genius,” He repeats. “You: a visionary. I’m going to get on that,” Bob squeezes my shoulder and stomps to the armory.

“Show me when you’re done!” I call to him, he stumbles and shouts back something about me being a visionary.

I am alone in the snow, staring down the ramp. My mind wanders and I find myself thinking back to how Bob’s breath fogged in the air as he spoke. This means Elpis still has some atmosphere, so we didn’t destroy it. I want to be relieved, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. Then it hits me. My breath isn’t visible in the cold.

I blow into the open air, cough, snort through my nose. Nothing.

Am I cold or am I . . .?

I don’t feel cold.

Not thinking, I reach a hand over my back to the small device planted on my shoulder. I close my eyes and rip off the O2 Kit. A rush of cool air hits my face. I breathe in, and nothing changes. My lungs don’t explode, my throat doesn’t constrict. I have, somehow, evolved to breathing in low atmosphere environments. My first thought is how useful this would be for deep space legion missions, and that, unfortunately, I won’t be doing any of those ever again.

“Montauk . . . ?”

I turn to see Boxer, posed walking towards me. He sees my face and the O2 Kit in my hand and puts two and two together.

“I didn’t know,” I blurt out because I’m more worried about Boxer thinking I kept this from him than his actual reaction to my mutated physiology.

“Montauk,” He sighs and closes the distance between us, taking the O2 Kit from me and looking it over. He stares at me through the thin visor of his kit. “Montauk, I’m so sorry this is happening, if I could help . . .”

I sigh. Somehow. Probably shouldn’t think too hard about that. “It can’t be helped,” I tell him and surprise both of us by laughing. “Is it bad that this isn’t the weirdest thing that’s happened to me?”

“Is it bad that I think things are going to get weirder?” Boxer asks, forcing a laugh despite the concern plain on his face. “Today was the first time since we entered this fissure that I didn’t feel like I had to watch my back constantly,” he admits. “It was nice, not being on edge for once, even if it is for one night.”

I want to agree with him. I know before all of this, I would have agreed with him. But I can’t deny the fact that I feel better than I ever have. The relics, The Watcher, it all makes me feel stronger, like I’m part of something bigger than me. But I know Boxer, and I’m not going to lie to him. So I say, “This place is our home. If you stop treating it like a tomb and accept that this—” I gesture at the cavern yawning below, “—is our world now, you won’t be on edge all the time.”

Boxer finds my eyes, which reflect pale blue into his own. “How can you just  _ accept  _ this? Every day I wake up in the same place I’m going to die. It’s . . . it’s . . . It’s shit. It’s all shit. This vault business is dangerous, and things are only getting worse the longer we stay. You and Colonel Zarpedon are . . .” He trails off helplessly.

“Why don’t we just leave here?” He says fiercely, suddenly, hand on my arm. “Just the two of us. We could take one of the jets and find fuel and  _ leave _ . There’s nothing on this rock but ruin. Whatever The Watcher wants it can handle it alone. You don’t have to throw your life away for some messed-up vault prophecy bullshit.” Boxer kicks a lump of snow down the ramp, watching it slide down, brow furrowed in frustration.

“We can’t leave,” I say. “And I’m so . . . connected to the vault or The Watcher or whatever is doing this to me. I don’t think I even  _ want _ to leave anymore. I don’t know why, but it’s like something is calling to me, keeping me here.” I sigh. If I could untangle myself from this web I would. If I could physically bring myself to leave the vault behind and explore the universe with Boxer I would in a heartbeat. “And the Legion needs us. We’re all here  _ together _ . Dahl already left us, we can’t leave our friends.”

“I know,” Boxer scowls. “I know. But I still hate this. All this not-knowing and waiting and wondering. How are we supposed to know that The Watcher isn’t using us for something? Or what if whatever The Colonel saw wasn’t related to the vault, it was a hallucination? Or what if it’s killing you?” He chokes up and gestures at me. “What if this vault whatever-the-hell kills you?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah? What makes you so bloody sure? You get a vision, too?”

“Boxer—”

“No. I’m tired of all these visions and strange feelings and voices in your head. This isn’t  _ right _ , Montauk, can’t you see that? If something happened to you or Corena or Best, I—” He cuts himself off, chest heaving. I reach out for him but he steps away, drawing into himself. “I should have stayed on Eden-6. I should have kept my head down and become a farmer, not get tangled up in vaults and watchers . . .” Boxer stares at me, eyes reddened, lip twitching. “I can’t lose you to this.” He swallows thickly and shakes his head and adds, “or the others.”

I only watch as he stalks to the barracks, holding himself against the cold, breaths coming out in puffs of hot air.


	7. Living on Elpis

2 YEARS 5 MONTHS INTO THE VIGIL

“You left someone,” The Colonel remarks, eyeing the locket around my neck.

I pick it up, rolling it between my thumb and forefinger, which are cracked and purple. “My kid sister,” I tell her. We didn't always get along, but that’s how siblings are. Yet now, in this fissure that will most likely be my tomb, I wish I had been kinder to her. Made less crude jokes. Most of all I wonder what life would be like if some miracle saved me from having to enlist. Where would we be then?

She looks away, frowning down at the endless canyon of crystal and eridian architecture. We stand together on an outcropping. Snow seeps through a tear in my worn boots. “When we were abandoned here I received information from my daughter. She was still connected to the ECHONet at the time, so she could be my eyes and ears. But when we went into the fissure . . .” She makes a sweeping motion at the canyon below. Again I find myself wondering what she saw down there, in the vault.

“Neither of us knows if the other is alive,” The Colonel tells me. “And . . . that’s how we’re used to living. I was always out on an assignment for Dahl and she was living on Elpis—one of the least hospitable places in the galaxy. But it’s different now. I’ll never see her again as you will never see your sister again.

“I’m doing this for the worlds. For our universe—hell, maybe even for reality as it exists now. But I’m also doing this for her. Brittania is smart and resourceful and strong, but she won’t survive in the world The Watcher showed me. That fact keeps me down here.”

I don’t know what to say so I keep quiet. The Colonel looks up at me again, the white light of her eyes hitting my face, the blue light of mine hitting hers.

“I know there is nothing that will change our situation, but I can’t help this feeling of guilt, that I’ve condemned us all here for an eternity.”

We blink at the same time. For a fleeting moment, the fissure is without our light.

“You have,” I tell her, “and that’s okay. Because if we didn’t want to be here, we’d leave. We aren’t being held hostage. We’re still here because we believe in you and we believe in protecting the vault. Don’t blame yourself for this. You don’t have to carry this weight alone.”

She looks unsure, eyebrows pinched together, mouth drawn in a thin line. The muscles in her neck flex as she grapples with a difficult memory.

“We’re all still here because of you. The Lost Legion exists and is strong because you are the person leading it. If Lieutenant Avett were in charge instead of you . . .” I trail off. The Colonel laughs.

“If he heard you saying that—”

“He’d make me disassemble and clean every gun in the armory, or have me sweep the training grounds,” I say, “or catalog every blue or rarer shield mod we own, just because he feels like it.”

“Or all three before the end of the light cycle,” The Colonel adds with a chuckle. “Alright, I get what you mean. Thank you—for being here and listening to my ramblings.”

“Hey, we’re all stuck in this pit together. It’s the least I could do.”

She glances over my shoulder, face falling into a neutral, serene smile. I turn and see The Watcher, hovering a few meters away, holding The Colonel’s staff. The Colonel pats my shoulder as she passes, careful not to touch the relics on my armor.

“Montauk, it was nice talking with you, as always. Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” I say, not liking the finality of her statement.  _ How much of the potential future did she see? _

* * *

3 YEARS INTO THE VIGIL

An important thing I have learned while living on Elpis is that low gravity and no gravity are two completely different environments. Low gravity is a spectrum, like gender or light. Elpis falls further towards the no gravity side of the spectrum, but that doesn’t mean gravity is absent. Things still fall. And they can fall  _ hard _ .

“Broken in four places,” Boxer announces. I groan, numbed by the painkillers, and thoroughly bored of sitting on the examination table.

‘Will an Insta-Health fix this?” I ask hopefully.

Boxer shakes his head, setting the portable x-ray down on the crate nearest him, “Not with this kind of damage. Why weren’t you wearing a shield?”

“Nobody wears a shield these days. We live in a hole in the ground, the only thing I’d need a shield for is to protect myself from Corena if I messed with her rifle or something.”

“A shield wouldn’t help you then,” Boxer says with a chuckle.

It probably would have helped me the other day. I was sitting on the edge of the platform when a piece of moon debris the size of a tire fell through the fissure, picking up momentum. It landed directly on my leg. I nearly blacked out from the shock alone.

Now Boxer is here. He tends to me in the cool, collected, caring way we’ve all grown used to. Me especially, seeing as we’re close. The splint he attached to my leg makes walking difficult, especially in the low gravity. I can’t wear my weighted boots anymore either, which makes getting out of bed and dressing myself in the barracks a chore. For the time being, I’m stuck in the infirmary with Boxer. Most of the time he sleeps in the barracks—I know because he likes to do my hair up before bed, or talk early in the mornings, or come to be in the middle of the night because he knows I’m not sleeping. Yet he moved into the infirmary with me. Says it’s to make sure I don’t break my other leg.

“I envy you,” Boxer yawns one morning, movements sluggish with sleep. “You don’t get those weird nightmares anymore.”

“You’re still getting them?” I ask. I’ve been up since,  _ well _ . I hand him a coffee. Ours is made from powder in vacuum-sealed pouches. Tastes like wet gravel but, hey, it’s caffeine.

He accepts the thermos and rubs his eye with the heel of his hand. “I think everyone is. It’s not as frequent but they’re still strange.” He shakes his head as if it will rid him of the memory. “Thank you, by the way.”

I shrug. It was a pain walking to the mess hall and back, but he’s been waiting on me hand and foot for days now. “How are you?” I ask. He glances at me over the thermos. “Feeling, I mean.”

“I’m still stuck in a hole underground waiting for the end of the world,” he takes a sip, “but I think I’m handling it pretty well, considering. Not a lot of people care how I’m feeling, thank you for asking.”

I shrug. “You’ve been taking care of me and my busted leg for days now. The least I could do is ask you how you feel.”

Boxer smiles. An odd, quirked thing. Unplanned and genuine. “Taking care of you hasn’t been a chore. You’re a good patient and good company.”

I ignore the growing heat in my stomach. “How long until I can walk properly?”

He caps the thermos and walks to my side, rolling my leg to get a better look at the splint. Pain tugs through my knee, but it’s enough to ignore. What’s difficult to ignore is the way Boxer’s tired haze disappears as he examines my leg. I am enamored with the sure sharpness of his movements. His brow creases in concentration, eyes darting around, observing. He touches certain parts of the splint and my leg, lips moving in soft, unspoken words. He isn’t a professional, but when he’s focused, he’s  _ focused _ . So much so he doesn’t notice me outright staring at him. I catch a flash of pink when he wets his bottom lip, preparing to give me the verdict on my fucked leg.

“This would be a lot faster if we didn’t lose more than half our supplies in the Drakensburg,” He mutters, tugging at the split to see my skin. “But I’d say you’re in for at least two more months of the splint.”

“Tw— _ two more months? _ ”

Boxer chuckles, “Never broken a bone?”

“Not this badly . . .”

He shrugs, patting my knee. “The bones have to set together in the right position. That’s what the splint is for. But it’s not so bad, you won’t be missing out on anything.”

“Unless a bunch of vault hunters burst in here right now.”

“In that case, Corena would have to carry you.”

I laugh at that.

“But for the time being, you’re stuck with me,” He says, taking another sip from the thermos.

“I am fine with that.”

Boxer gives me an odd look over the thermos, full lips pulling to the side in a slight smile. He sets it on a crate and wipes his hands down the front of his shirt. After a moment of long eye contact he says,“I am too.” He pauses to rub my thigh before going to grab himself breakfast. I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

* * *

3 YEARS 4 MONTHS INTO THE VIGIL

I don’t want to do this, but I do. It’s a strange duality. On one hand, the thing scares me half to death. Every time I see it I jump. All it does is float around and watch, sometimes whispering to The Colonel. But when I’m close to The Watcher, I’m overcome with a sense of calm. Waves of soothing, heavy serenity; this thing knows me better than I know myself. It  _ should _ make me uncomfortable, and that’s what bothers me. There’s this threshold I always cross, where the fear melts away into familiarity, hope, and assurance.

I feel it all now as I walk towards the thing. It stands on the snowy edge of an outcropping, watching the camp ambivalently as always. As I get closer, my anxieties are washed away like grit down the drain. It tilts its head marginally at me as I near.

“Hello,” I say, more a reflex than anything. I doubt it cares about social niceties. “Where do you get these . . . things?” I touch the artifacts and relics wrapped to my armor. The ones on my arms, legs, chest. I’ve strapped a few to my back and boots as well. I don’t know why, but I  _ have to _ . “And what are they?”

The Watcher turns its head fully to look down at me, standing beside it like a lost child.

_ You do not like them? _

“No, I do, it’s . . .” What are the words for this feeling? For this endless howling cavern in my chest that closes every time I receive a new gift. My hands work almost of their own volition, tying, strapping, gluing the things onto my armor, poking holes through the smaller ones to thread into my clothing. When they are away from me I am empty, a yawning formless absence of life. When they are near I am more than I am, I am beyond completed.

“What is happening to me?”

With a thick, languid motion, it plucks a horn-like protrusion from its insectoid abdomen. It examines the thing—the bone, whatever it is—for a silent, horrible moment. I realize its intention and turn my gaze terribly upon my relics. How many of these are bones? How many are the remains of eridians? Or other guardians?

The Watcher takes my hand, pressing the thing into my open palm and closing my fingers around it. The motion breathes life into my lungs. Suddenly I am bigger than myself, more than myself. The distinctly burnt taste of starlight swells on my tongue. I lose the sensation when I open my mouth to gasp.

_ Soon. _

I take the gift, slipping it into my front pocket so it rests heavily on my chest. I have countless more questions, but less drive to ask, my frenzy blanketed in an alien calm. I will know soon, as it said. As I leave The Watcher’s side, and the thick haze leaves me, I catch Boxer watching from across the camp, an unreadable expression on his face. I wish he could see what I see in these gifts. I wish I knew what I see in these gifts.


	8. When it Happened

When it happened, we were ready. We had been preparing for them for four years. They barely put up a fight. Corena, Bob, and I had them stunned and tied up in minutes. Not that I would expect anything less from Hyperion. When we left for Elpis in the Drakensburg, Hyperion was a barely functioning weapons and combat gear company. Now they’re sending survey teams to Elpis.

The Colonel is fuming. We sit in her tent with the three remaining scouts. The rest we fed to the marines, who used them as target practice for what I assume was an entertaining afternoon. I wouldn’t know, I’m stuck in here with these especially tight-lipped prisoners.

The staff and The Watcher are hiding, best Hyperion doesn’t know about either yet, The Colonel said.

“We aren’t gonna ask you again,” Bob says, refueling his four-hose flame turret, “so tell us how you found this place.”

Corena leans against a support pole, arms crossed, eyes narrowed, a single braid halving her face. Her prized possession, one of Best’s many birthday gifts, hangs on her back, long and deadly, and probably weighs more than me. She calls it the  _ Pitchfork _ .

The Colonel stops pacing, holding her arms out expectantly as if to say  _ well? _

One of the Hyperion scouts speaks up, trying to keep eye contact with The Colonel, yet his gaze keeps sliding to me on the other side of the tent. “I-I . . . look, can you tell that  _ thing _ to leave? It keeps  _ looking  _ a-at me and,” He shudders.

Bob cracks a grin, shooting me a sidelong glance, “He can smell fear.”

For emphasis, I sniff the air and smile serenely. The scouts look ready to piss their uniforms. Corena watches us play with the quiet patience of a viper readying to strike. I can’t tell what she’s thinking but I know she isn’t intent on sitting back and letting all the action go on without her.

“This  _ thing _ is one of my men,” The Colonel snaps. “Answer the question.”

“I don’t know, okay?” One of the scouts says, “We’re just a survey team, you know—checking out the area, reporting back on anything we find, and leaving.”

Bob snorts. “I don’t believe you. Why would Hyperion send a team to Elpis? Why not, oh I dunno, Atlas? Hell, I’d even consider Tediore or Maliwan before  _ Hyperion _ .”

“What do you mean?” Another asks. “Atlas? We came from Helios.”

“What the hell is a ‘Heel-os?’”

“No,  _ Helios _ . It’s Hyperion’s space station. It’s in Elpis’ orbit, there’s no way you could have missed it.”

Hyperion has a space station? Since when? When was the last time we sent a team up to the surface? From the looks on my companion’s faces, they’re thinking the same thing. The Colonel walks back to Corena and they speak quietly in the corner. Bob watches them, then turns his attention back on the survey team.

“Tell me about Helios,” He says, cool and collected, with all the confidence of a man who knows he will soon get the satisfaction of a kill.

The Hyperion scouts catch on to this. “Why should we tell you anything? You’re just going to kill us anyway.”

Bob opens his mouth, closes it. He looks to me for help as if I know anything about interrogation. My training didn’t go beyond sleeping anywhere and shooting anything, but to hell with it, they’re already scared of me. I crouch down in front of them. Two fight against their bonds to look away from me. I never considered myself particularly frightening, but I’ve been around the same people since my transformation started. They’re all used to me.

I nod at Bob, who still has his Dahl forehead implant. Mine fell out when almost all the skin on my face became purple and mottled. “You think we’re Dahl. You think we’re your enemies. We left Dahl. We’re our own faction, and we don’t care about your petty corporate wars. We just want to know what the hell is going on, and if you don’t shoot at us when we release you, we won’t shoot back.”

Bob backs me up. “That sound good to you?”

Two of them nod. The other stays staring at the floor. Bob kicks his chair.  _ “I said _ , does that sound good to you?”

“Yes,” The scout chokes out. Hyperion may have a space station and armed scouts, but they’re still all pencil-pushers and programmers; easy to break. It seems some things never change.

“So tell us about Helios,” I say slowly, measuredly, making direct eye contact with each of them.

“Hyperion built the space station after the vault on Pandora was opened—” One of them starts.

The Colonel drops her pistol in surprise. The scout’s head snaps up at the noise. “A vault?” The Colonel repeats, “On Pandora?” The scout nods and dread seeps into her face. Her eyes find mine and she shakes her head in disdain.

All we’ve worked for. These last four years of vigilance and waiting and a vault opened on Pandora. My heart sinks. The Colonel scoops up her pistol in a daze, eyes roving the curves and planes of the weapon as if it’ll give her all the answers. She hands it over to Corena and clenches her fists.

Bob continues, trying to act like it doesn’t bother him. “Keep going.”

The scout keeps watching The Colonel as if she might lash out at any moment. I’m numb. How long has the vault been open? How long have we been sitting here, so sure of our mission, while some vault-hunting, Pandoran hayseeds unleash unspeakable eridian power?

“The . . . the vault was opened,” The scout continues uneasily, “which was when Tassiter started the construction of Helios.”

“Who’s that,” Bob grunts.

The scout looks confused, exchanging quick, hesitant glances with his companions. “Tassiter is the CEO.”

I rack my brain trying to remember who the CEO was when we left. Some older guy. Scary. Smile like a cracked mirror. Turner . . . something.

“He started the construction of Helios in Elpis’ orbit. We sent teams down to Pandora to salvage anything from the creature in the vault. It’s eye powers Helios’ laser. And recently we started making ambulatory robots, with legs instead of the one wheel, it’s—”

“That’s enough,” The Colonel says. She waves her hand in a flippant motion. “Take them out.”

The scout’s eyes grow hopeful until Corena levels her gun and he realizes what The Colonel meant. She makes short work of them with The Colonel’s pistol. Bob’s mouth hangs open in surprise and his shoulders fall as the scouts’ heads loll back.

“But I was going to . . .” He gestures at the turret and sighs.

Corena spins the pistol in her hand, no pleasure in the motion. She watches it twirl with narrowed eyes and a frown, brain working double-time.

“What do we do now?” I ask, throwing my hands.

“We leave the fissure. Not all of us, but we need to establish camps outside, expand our numbers. And I must see this Helios thing for myself,” The Colonel replies, pacing again. “We can recruit and train the natives if we have to. Hyperion cannot open any more vaults.”

“How are we gonna do that from the ground?” Bob asks, “They have a laser made from a vault monster! We have a couple of powersuits and some old fighter jets, most of which were stolen.”

“I know . . . I know, but . . .” The Colonel takes a moment to think, hands pressed to her temples. For a moment I wonder if she can communicate telepathically like The Watcher. She opens her eyes with a clear, open expression on her face. “We take Helios.”

Corena blinks. The gun stops spinning.

“We take Helios and we use the laser against them,” She exclaims, the revelation putting a frantic edge into her voice. “The vaults hold immense power, this laser could feasibly . . .”

“What?” Bob demands. I’m about to do the same.

“The moon isn’t safe anymore. There’s no way we can save it like this. If we want to keep the vault from being opened we have to destroy it.”


	9. A Different World

"Been a while since I've worn this thing," Boxer says of his combat gear. Unlike most of us, he's been wearing casual clothes throughout the vigil. In contrast to the greens and grays of most Dahl Legion armor, combat medics are white and red, so they stand out more in the frenzy of battle. He fills his bright red backpack with supplies. I toss him a wad of gauze when he asks for it.

"Been a while since I've seen any action," I grin, likely looking manic. Eyes still glowing, skin still a marbled purple mess, one of Boxer's messy braids hanging down my back, armor covered in all sorts of eridian relics. I am not recognizable as a Sergeant anymore, I lack the mass I used to have, the luster of the armor, the pins and badges. The relics mask what my uniform used to look like.

Boxer snorts, "A siege on Hyperion doesn't sound like action to me. What are they going to do? Fight back with spreadsheets?"

"I told you, things have changed. They've got a—"

"Yeah," Boxer waves a hand dismissively, "The Colonel won't stop talking about it. Maybe I'll change my mind when I see this giant space station for myself."

"We're about to do that. You done packing?"

"What? Is the entire Lost Legion waiting on me? Let me get my things. If I'm not packed, I won't be able to save your ass on the big, scary space station."

I chuckle and ask him if he wants my help. He opens his mouth to say something, reconsiders, and sets the bag aside. "Actually, Montauk I was thinking—"

A familiar calm hits my spine. 

I turn. In the doorway of the infirmary is The Watcher. One arm extended towards me, holding something in its spindly fingers. Boxer is quiet as I walk around the cots and stacks of supplies, eyes locked on whatever The Watcher holds. Already I feel it tugging at my psyche. I'm drawn like a moth to a flame.

It is a mask. Made of the same material as the other relics. A smooth, ovaline shape, swelling where the brow bone and nose would be. Two holes for the eyes. Crownlike protrusions sprout from the forehead. I take it from The Watcher, slowly, delicately. It bows its head at me and glides out. There's already a leathery cord wrapped around it, making it easy to slip on and off.

Behind me, Boxer lets out a breath.

I feel stronger holding this mask. More connected to . . . everything. It's as if the stars are close enough to hear.

"What were you . . ." I tear my eyes from the mask and turn back to Boxer. "What were you going to say?"

Boxer shakes his head, gaze locked on the mask in my hands. "Doesn't matter," He mutters, going back to packing. 

* * *

When we get to the surface, we are greeted by a different world. A massive H-shaped space station floats in front of Elpis. So large I can't see the bottom as it stretches out of view. Looks like it was plastered to the front of Elpis, an eye to watch over Pandora. The present has left us behind.

What remains of our fleet sits haphazardly on the rocks in staggered rows. A few of the fighter jets are missing. Hijacked or scrapped for parts, I can't tell. The remaining jets are covered in graffiti and a film of moon dust. The Colonel informs us that before we depart, each jet has to be cleaned. I would drag my feet and groan like the marines, but I can't deny how the routine makes me feel less chaotic. This is the kind of thing we would do before a mission back in the legions. The kind of thing I can handle. It doesn't change the fact that we've been living in the center of a moon for the last four years, protecting alien artifacts from being used to end the universe as we know it, and only now leave to stop a megacorporation from bringing the apocalypse, but it helps with the nerves.

Most people don't even blink at the mask around my neck. They're used to my obsession with eridians by now. A few others have started doing the same. Granted, they're all as sleep-deprived, starved, and purple as me, but it's nice to not be completely alone in my affliction.

I lose Boxer while we prep the jets. The rare times I catch sight of him he's in a large group, usually surrounded by the other combat medics. Sometimes I glance over at him to catch him watching me as well. I know he hates The Watcher, the vault, and all it's done to us. I want to apologize, but what will that do? I'm still changed, I'm still wearing the relics.

Am I in the wrong here? Have I completely lost myself? I can't remember what I looked like before all of this. Sometimes I stare down at her face in the locket. I know we look similar, I know we share the same genes and bone structure and hair and eyes, but I can't see it anymore. I'm something else. It's been years since I've seen myself and longer since I've seen her. How much has she changed?

If I think about her too long I can't focus. So I don't. I push her face to the back of my mind, tuck the locket into my gear, and keep working.

Once the fighter jets are primed, The Colonel divides us into groups, each to a jet, where we further divide into smaller teams. The marines buzz with excitement as we pile into the bay, pilots exchanging information over the coms.

As The Colonel's ship gains air, she activates the master com, voice crackling over our ECHOs. "Protect the vaults—to the last." This sentiment is echoed throughout the ship as we take off. I've missed this feeling. The vibrations of the ship, the hum of the lights, the drone of excited chatter. The feeling of connectedness as we all enter the fray.

Corena finds me through the crowd, not a difficult task, I stand out like a sore thumb. She takes the seat opposite me, not bothering to strap herself in as we won't even break orbit. Her armor is lighter than the marines'. Dark grey fatigues, sparse armor plates, and gloves. Tech embedded into the wrist guards tracks and suppresses the pulse for pinpoint-accurate shots. The helmet is a standard Dahl make and accented with purple specs. The goggles track pulse, heat signatures, calculate wind speed, among other things. If Dahl does anything right, it's war.

She pulls her helmet off, braids spilling out and down her shoulders, she grins. "I cannot wait to use this," She pats the Pitchfork, slung across her back.

"Where's Best?" I ask. The young Corporal has become her shadow; never are the two seen apart.

Corena looks off to the side as if she can see outside the hull. "With Bob and Zarpedon. Zarpedon is planning to use her power suit."

"I didn't even know she had one," I reply. That'll be a sight to see. I wonder if it was custom made.

Corena tilts her head at me, eyes lingering on the mask. "Is The Watcher coming?"

"Does The Colonel go anywhere without it?"

She nods, thinking. Something across the bay catches her eye and she beckons someone over with a wave of her hand. I turn to see Boxer. His eyes hit the mask before finding my face. I wince, but as he gets closer, his lips crack into the start of a smile, eyes sparking when they meet mine. He takes the seat next to Corena.

"It's nice to finally be out of that pit," I stretch my legs for emphasis, hoping to brush past the awkwardness from earlier.

Boxer laughs, "Easy for you knuckleheads to say. I barely remember how to use this thing." He pats the Res-Gun on his hip. It's standard-issue Dahl tech, like what we all carry. Exclusive to medics, though. It patches up wounds in seconds while providing small doses of adrenaline and steroids. It doesn't truly mend anything, per se, all it does is apply an immediate covering on wounds to get the grunts back in action. I've had a Res-Gun used on me in the past. Weird feeling.

"Hopefully you won't have to use it that much," I say. 

"Gone soft?" Corena sneers.

I shrug, "I've had four years to reflect on my life as a puppet for Dahl's monopolization of war profiteering." It's  _ mostly  _ a joke.

"And. . .?" Boxer leans forward. He seems genuinely interested in my answer, unlike Corena, who absently tugs on one of the straps holding her shoulder plate on.

"And I dunno. Yeah, I'd rather not be a soldier to protect some ancient power from destroying the universe. But I'm not going to just abandon the Legion."

"That's always how it is," Corena drawls, "the battle between what you want to do, and what you must do."

Boxer looks unconvinced but he knows not to argue with Corena. I don't argue either—she has a point. I'd go mad with guilt if I left the Legion now. Heavy on the if. Something still draws me to protecting the vault the same way I'm drawn to the relics.


	10. Siege of Helios

We haven’t seen battle in over four years. Even with the training, there were bound to be a few issues. An elemental marine—one of Bob's trainees specifically—melted six of his fingers off when he tried to fire his laser weapon. It jammed and overheated. He sent his complaints through Bob to The Colonel, who had a powersuit sent to him. We don't have many—he was given the elemental prototype. Painted red, equipped with a massive blowtorch, the works. Bob tried not to look as jealous as he felt. Now the marine is stomping around the station, throwing Hyperion employees into walls and setting service robots on fire. Calls the suit Flame Knuckle. He's on a complete power trip, screaming and melting the walls. I'm momentarily distracted from holding the Hub of Heroism as Flame Knuckle turns a loader bot into a melted puddle.

The Colonel's voice crackles over the radio, sharp and frantic. The signal is difficult to catch under the mess of gunfire and shouting, but it seems she's hit some resistance. The problem is, it isn't Hyperion infantry.

Corena stiffens ever so slightly as she fires. She turns and stares at me, "Did she say the heavy resistance is  _ seven  _ people?"

"Don't know, I didn't catch that part."

She shakes her head. "I heard something about a ship that burst through the landing bay. Maybe they called in special forces."

"Since when has Hyperion ever had special forces?" I ask, chucking my Tediore reload. It goes wide, bouncing off the wall and exploding in a trash can. I adjust to the weight as the gun digistructs in my hand.

"Since Hyperion had a space station." Corena bites back. "Keep your eyes open for a group of seven."

"Aye." I'm not worried, we haven't encountered a single person even resembling military. Some of the Hyperion employees are armed, but mostly we're dealing with turrets and other automated security. Boxer doesn't activate his Res-Gun once.

The marines, who were frothing at the bit for a real fight on the way in, are sorely disappointed. And bored. And armed. Quickly the proposed siege descends into madness, marines shooting anything that moves—even those who attempt to surrender, even each other. I try to focus on taking out the turrets with Corena and Boxer, but it's difficult to ignore the raucous laughter of the three behind us, kicking a hapless clerk into silence.

Our quest to take out the turrets leads us across the space station. Those who came before us have marked the walls with Legion slogans and warnings against opening the vaults. 

We emerge into the loading bay, a docking area technically outside of the space station, but encased in a massive artificial atmosphere generator. Hyperion and their fancy toys. Escape pods try to flee, but our jets shoot them down. They tailspin back into the innards of Helios.

On the other side of the platform is The Colonel in her power suit, flanked by Bob and Best, looking like something out of a Dahl recruitment poster. The two corporals are armed to the teeth in their military green combat armor, both carrying shotguns as their primaries. Best's visor looks polished. Bob stands out in the fatigues he dyed bright red. I can feel him grinning at me when he waves us over.

Corena nudges Best's shoulder with her own, "Everything good?"

Best snorts, "I can handle myself fine," She says defensively, then caves, "But yeah, everything's good. Did you have any trouble getting in?"

While Corena and Best check in with each other, Bob claps me on the back, nearly shattering one of my relics. He inhales deeply, coming out as static through the speaker in his helmet. "Gotta love that smell. Fried air and gunpowder."

"You've been out of the field too long," I chuckle.

"Damn straight. Not that this is  _ in the field _ if you get what I mean. Did you find anything other than bots and desk jockeys?"

I shake my head. Boxer tells him about the turrets.

"Colonel already shouted over the coms about it but we've been hearing about a group of seven tearing through our men. Mercenaries probably, one of them is some guy—Jack. We're thinking he's the employer, he should be wearing some Hyperion identification thing, but watch your six, copy?"

"Copy," Boxer says for me.

"I'm hoping I run into them. It'd give me something to do."

"That won't be happening," The Colonel says, turning to us. The massive arm of the powersuit nearly knocks Boxer off the platform. He jumps out of the way at the last second, taking place by my side. He stands close enough his O2 Kit bubbles around my armor.

"What?" Bob groans, "Colonel, come on."

"Some other time," She promises, "I want you inside, go capture—"

"There's Elpis," A voice says from across the platform. On the other side of the docking area stands a group of seven. They can't see us, elevated on the other side. The leader continues talking. They have to be the most ragtag group of mercs I've ever seen. Before I can get a good look at them The Colonel all but shoves us in the direction of the nearest bulkhead door.

"Go," She hisses, pounding controls into her power suit. We heed her advice, loping across the metal flooring to the door. Heavy boots reverberating against the plating. The mercenaries hear us and start shouting. And firing.

The Colonel departs in her powersuit as jets descend on the mercenaries. The jets aren't fast enough. I hear the crack of a Jakobs rifle seconds before Best trips. It depletes her shield and then some. She stumbles into Corena, who picks her up, carrying her the rest of the way as her fatigues are consumed by a growing dark stain. I turn to see the sniper chambering another round, barely noticing the woman next to her. She tips her magenta cowboy hat at me and levels her pistol. Before I can react, she fires the entire cylinder at me. My shield eats three and sputters out. The rest go through my stomach and out my back.

Pain hits me like a truck. Piercing my abdomen, swelling up my chest and down my legs. I lose my footing. Bob grabs my arm, Boxer the other. I'm venting blood like a water balloon, slipping in it, boots losing traction.

The door hisses closed behind us. Footsteps bang on a metal staircase, echoing in a high-ceilinged room. We pass by a control console. Corena shouts something. Bob's trying to get me to walk but I can't maneuver through the pain stiffening my joints. It's getting cold.

Another door opens, closes. More stomping. Another door. I open my eyes. When did I close them? We're in a smaller room. Maintenance closet, maybe. Black and red accents like the whole damn place. Black and red, who told them black and red looked any good?

There are people in here. Hyperion employees. They scream, holding each other and babbling while Bob attaches a fresh drum to his shotgun. They go down with a shot each. I'm slumped against a wall, trying not to blackout from the pain. It's a miracle I'm even standing, but at this point, I don't think I could move if I wanted to. Everything hurts.

Bob drags the two Hyperion corpses into the corner while Boxer and Corena kneel over Best. Her helmet lies discarded on the ground. She isn't moving. Corena's helmet is impassive, but her hands shake as she pulls Best's armor off. Her fatigues are sticky and dark. Corena's fumbling and shouting at Boxer to get the Res-Gun out. He keeps trying to explain that Best is gone but Corena won't listen. She slams her fist on the ground and shoves Boxer, trying to grab the device off his belt. Bob pulls her back by her armpits, dragging her off Best and away from Boxer. She howls and claws at his hands.

"Get Montauk," Bob snaps, "get your fucking heal-gun-thing and—" Corena headbutts him in the stomach, he goes down with a groan, and they both stumble back.

Boxer heads over to me, fumbling with his Res-Gun. I'm filled with a deep sense of calm and I find myself wondering if Best felt this way moments ago. If this is the reassurance of death. Boxer loses his breath when I shift my hand and a sheet of blood pours down. My legs are shaking but I can’t feel them.

The Res-Gun whirs to life, an orange glow forming between the metal claws. Boxer holds it towards me as he gets closer. He's talking softly, trying to reassure me—or himself—that I'm going to be okay. It's proving difficult to focus on his voice.

Something builds inside me. Something like nothing I've ever felt before. It's the feeling I get from the relics magnified to infinitum. I stumble forward, shoving the Res-Gun away as my vision whitens until I am blinded by the glaring brightness of my own eyes. An immeasurable feeling of belonging fills the spaces between my bones. Someone screams my name.

I'm not even touching the ground anymore. My feet have risen from the floor. I know what this is. I've stood on the edge of this power for so long. The vault calls out to me and I answer, ascending.

I am, completely and inextricably, a part of the vaults. A protector.

My senses return to me. I am hovering in the air, suspended in a sphere of crackling energy. The others are pressed against the wall, shocked by what I have become. They shout at me and talk fiercely to each other. Boxer stands in the middle of it all, Res-Gun abandoned, hands hanging at his sides. He gapes up at me with an expression of unknowing. A mix of confusion and abject horror. He is scared of me.

I fall. Crumpling to my knees on the metal floor. The moment the vault's energy leaves me I am left feeling like a tank rolled over my entire body. Not physical pain, but exhaustion. Exhaustion and the horrible emptiness that eats at me without the power of the vault. Because that's what it was, wasn't it? The vault. Or whatever's inside it, or whatever it is. Some eldritch relic of a forgotten time, bleeding through me.

Bob helps me to my feet, I fumble for my shirt, feeling beyond the shredded fabric. The bullet holes are gone. Feeling returns to my limbs. I tell Bob about the missing wounds. He shakes his head and asks me if I seriously think that's the weirdest thing about this whole situation. He sits me down on the floor next to Best. Corena slips Best's helmet over her placid face, touching the visor with two fingers before making piercing and venomous eye contact with me.

"What the _hell_ just happened."

I glance over her shoulder at Boxer, who stands watch by the door, not looking my way. He glares pointedly at nothing, muscles in his face and neck pulled taut. I don't want to slump here answering questions. I want to go to him and make this right. I can't lose him too.

"The vault," I tell her, "I don't know how, but it—I felt it. It was like it . . ." I fumble for the words, "It was reaching out to me, but I lost it."

Corena shakes her head, "Too much shit happening today," She mutters to herself. "Will you be alright?"

I shrug, eyes drifting from Boxer to Best's corpse. Corena nods in solemn understanding, crawling over to my side and leaning against the wall with me. She closes her eyes, her way of accepting my company, showing me she is comforted in my presence. We sit together in a heavy silence. Bob paces, trying to contact The Colonel on his ECHO while Boxer keeps watch.

Life just does whatever it wants with you. Best died in seconds. The Colonel is gone. We're stranded in a closet. I've just done  _ something _ . And none of us have any idea what the future holds. The vigil was so planned, each day a routine. We had a mission. Now, after four years, we enter a world that has morphed and changed and left us behind. Anything could happen at any moment. We could die here, in this closet. We could never see The Colonel again. We could go down with the space station in a blazing, unstoppable, impassive show of light and the futility of human existence.

I look over at Boxer for probably the tenth time in the last five minutes. He still doesn't look my way, brooding and disturbed in his blood-splattered armor. I've seen his face countless times, I know it better than my own hands. The lines and scars in his tanned, olive skin, the slope of his nose, the way his eyes crinkle at the sides. I think back to that time in the snow, after Corena's first birthday in the vigil. He asked me to leave with him and I refused. I don't want to refuse now. I want to leave with him, and Corena, and Bob, and The Colonel, and Best. I want to take control of my life before it takes control away from me again.


	11. Recent Developments

The Colonel made contact with us hours after Best died. The mercenaries—which have been confirmed to be vault hunters—left for Elpis. Flame Knuckle was destroyed and its operator killed, along with dozens of others the vault hunters cut through. The Lost Legion has started setting up camps in Helios. Ours is just outside the maintenance closet.

I find Boxer sitting on a crate inside the closet, staring down at the red stain Best left. Her body, along with the others, has been burned and the ashes vented into space. He looks up at me and then back at the floor.

"So, what, then? You're a bloody siren now?"

"I don't think it's like that. Not exactly."

He huffs, worn out and overworked. With the sea of casualties the vault hunters left in their wake, he's been working double-time to get everyone patched up. There are only a handful of combat medics in the Lost Legion. He's one of the best, and subsequently one of the most sought after.

I sink to the floor in front of him, forcing him to look at me. His lips curl back in a scowl but the disturbance doesn't reach his eyes, which stay hollow and saddened.

"I knew this vault business was no good," He says finally. "I  _ told  _ you."

"I know."

"And now we're fighting vault hunters, and messing with vault magic, and Best is dead—" His voice breaks. He sighs, sets his shoulders. "When you first . . ." He gestures helplessly with his hand, "I thought it was going to kill you. I thought you were going to explode and we'd be scraping bits of Montauk off the walls for days."

I can't help but chuckle. He shoots me a glare.

"I couldn't stop thinking that you were going to die and I never told you that I—" He catches himself and laughs, finally meeting my eyes. He looks as if he's resigning himself to losing some internal battle. "When Best died, she and Corena . . . Best knew she wasn't alone. If that cowgirl sharpshooter out there kills one of us, I want you to know that I'm thinking of you. All the time. And I have been for a while."

"Boxer . . ." I say, because what the hell else can I say? What else but his name do I want to say? I still don't know what he sees in me. How he—strong, compassionate Boxer—could come to care about the train wreck I've become, the mindless grunt I was. He's still not looking at me, afraid of my reaction. Can't he see he has nothing to worry about? Can't he see I've already slipped and fallen for that intent gaze, those pursed lips, that dark, amber skin, the compassion, the dedication?

I take his hands and his eyes dip to our tangled fingers. He doesn't need me to say anything. He understands with this gesture how much he means to me.

"I think about you a lot too," I tell him. Because lame as it sounds, it's true, and he deserves that. His eyes snap to mine, haunted and shadowed in this bloodstained maintenance closet. 

The door slams open. "You two done making out?" Bob barks, not waiting for an answer, "Cause The Colonel's got an announcement to make, she wants both of you to hear it."

"Both of us?" Boxer asks

"Making out?" I gape.

"Yes to both of your dumbass questions. Get your ECHOs and get out here." He jerks his thumb at the camp behind him.

Boxer and I follow him—albeit awkwardly—out into the trashed halls of Hyperion. The Lost Legion hasn't completely taken over, but our hold on the space station is strong. I haven't seen a Hyperion uniform not on a corpse in days. The PA system still drones on, though. Someone's still alive to keep the stupid thing running.

Corena leans against one of the many floor-to-ceiling windows, staring off into space. She's been doing that a lot since Best's ashes were vented into it. I wish I had the words for her. We lock eyes and she dips her head at me in acknowledgment.

The ECHO buzzes to life, our Colonel's voice crackling over the Legion-wide channel. She starts with the customary introductions, reading off casualty statistics, how much of the space station we have captured, and the whereabouts of the vault hunters on Elpis. Then she touches on something else.

"There have been recent . . . developments," The Colonel starts, "with those of us affected by the vault. As you all are aware, a portion of our soldiers have been changed by being near the vault. You've seen the purple rashes, the eyes, heard the stories of sleepless nights and losing the need for food. These are our brothers and sisters, no matter how much the vault changes them.

"I have consulted The Watcher. This is not a medical condition, it comes from the vault. You have likely seen one of these soldiers ascend and gain otherworldly powers. This is a gift from the eridians, from the vault. These people are Eternals."

How long has she known this? I look up from my ECHO and my eyes find Kenta's. She is like me, with fewer rashes. Her glowing blue eyes search my face for an answer and I know she's thinking the same thing.

"Eternals who are confused about their current situation should report to Sergeant Montauk of the—" She catches herself, about to say my now-defunct Dahl designation. She clears her throat, "From what I know, Sergeant Montauk is the first Eternal in our ranks, with the most progressed condition. He has been handling these changes with the discipline and flexibility of our finest Legion soldiers. I will provide a waypoint to his location if there are further questions."

I wish I could agree with the blatant propaganda being spewed about me, but I can't. I didn't  _ handle  _ the changes so much as I let them happen to me while fearing for my future as a human being. But it's for the Legion, not me.

"Though this is not a medical affliction, I still advise Eternals to check in regularly with any available combat medics to ensure good health. To everyone else, remember that these are still valued members of the Lost Legion. Updates will come shortly regarding the capture of Helios' eye. Remember, the vaults must stay closed. To the last."

We all echo what has become the Lost Legion's motto. All eyes are on me. I've never been a public speaker so I shrug, reattach the ECHO to my hip, and go looking for Corena. I need her quiet wisdom, not the riling speeches of our leader, not the endless questions of the marines, just someone who will ground me. Corena excels in that.

* * *

Helios belongs to the Lost Legion. A handful of Hyperion employees have slipped through the cracks, barricading themselves in sealed rooms, but not once is our control contested. The space station is a far cry from our camps down in the fissure. There are  _ beds _ , first off, actual beds. Food, too. Vending machines, which prove great for keeping the marines stocked with weaponry, shields, and Insta-Healths.

Following The Colonel's speech about Eternals, they all flock to me. Asking questions, for guidance, and for help. As if I have all the answers. I'm not the Grand Eternal Expert everyone thinks I am, I'm just patient zero. I miss the days when all I was to them was Sergeant. Just enough power to be respected, but not enough that my responsibility left my squad. Now I have to be a physician, therapist, and mentor for a growing number of frightened Eternals. They all seem to think that because I was the first, I possess some divine vault knowledge, which would be great right about now.

I do what I can. Boxer helps. Corena, too. I think she needs something to distract herself. It seems to be working, she's been spending a lot of time talking to my Eternals and they all only have great things to say about her. I've tried to thank her for the help but she only waves me away.

Luckily I am momentarily exempt from my duties as Papa Eternal because The Colonel has called a meeting. It's intended to be in person, but we're spread throughout an entire space station. Those who can come should, those who cannot will listen over the ECHO. 

Corena, Boxer, and I sit against a wall in the Hyperion Hub of Heroism's central terminal. The Colonel stands in the middle of it all, in front of a broken elevator.

Sitting among the Lost Legion, surrounded by our spoils of this war, I am left empty. I thought this victory would make me feel something. I'm finally back in action, and we're  _ winning _ . But it all feels so hollow. If we take down Hyperion and the vault hunters, we will continue this fight again, the next time someone tries to open Elpis' vault. And again and again and again until I am dead and someone takes my place.

The Colonel doesn't share my doubt. She stands proud in front of all of us, wielding her staff. She twirls it experimentally, watching the rivulets of inky smoke dissipate into the recycled air. To quiet the crowd, she hits the end of the staff on the floor a few times.

"You know why we are here," She starts. It is now that I notice The Watcher, hovering off in the shadows behind an upturned trash can. It does what it always does—watches. "The Eye of Helios is our goal, but it is not the endgame. If we can get to the Eye, if we can control it, if we can destroy this moon before it destroys everything in existence, we will have met our goal. But oftentimes plans go awry. There are roadblocks, obstacles, sometimes the plan will need to be thrown out completely.

"I am rambling, I apologize," She offers a light, impartial smile. "We need a contingency plan if the Eye does not work. The Watcher and I are working on this, until then I will dispatch troops on Elpis to guard the vault in person. There are already soldiers down there, but we need more if we expect to hold ground. I will be organizing and deploying these troops as soon as I can. Expect to be relocated. Those who stay on Elpis will be given permanent posts in key areas. The reason I am now employing stricter routines is because of a certain . . . roadblock only recently discovered."

The vault hunters.

The Colonel gives us a rundown of who exactly these people are and what they're capable of. They are a misfit group—mercenaries from all over the galaxy, all specifically trained in certain niches. They're led by Jack, a Hyperion programmer. Not much is known about him other than his working history in Hyperion. All seven—including a body double Jack had commissioned to look exactly like him—are armed and dangerous.  _ Shoot to kill  _ The Colonel reminds us, as if we need it.

"A lot of people will die in this war," The Colonel continues gravely, "innocent people, good people. But this is a price we must pay for the protection of our universe. Even if we suffer thousands of casualties, we are saving millions.

"We are the defenders of this moon, but we also defend everything else in this galaxy. The power of the vaults is volatile and unrelenting. Opening one vault sparks a chain reaction of chaos, death, and destruction. It will not end until every planet and moon is dust. Which is why we must stop the chain now. Hyperion is nothing but an obstacle, one of many. Our duty is greater than them, it is greater than us. Our duty is to protect the worlds. To the last!"

"To the last!" Our voices reverberate off the high ceilings. But I don't feel it in my chest this time. The camaraderie and thrill of battle don't rattle my ribs and fill my lungs. All I hear is a slogan. All I see is another decade-spanning, costly, bloated corporate war in the making and I think of my sister. Of the slums in Promethea, drained by heavy wartime taxes, filled with crime and depravity and starvation. It's a product of the corporate wars, but also feeds them, churning out broke, impressionable youth like me for the meat grinder.

I only find out back at the camp that The Colonel has relocated me and all Eternals back down to Elpis. The order hits me like a slap in the face. I want to be here, with The Colonel and my friends. I can't leave them behind. The Colonel will throw herself into the vacuum of space if it means we'd win this. I need to be here so she won't do exactly that. 

* * *

"For the last time, Montauk, I need you on Elpis," The Colonel leans against the open loading hatch. She tugs on the cuffs of her gloves. "If Jack and his vault hunters get inside—"

"I know that, but what about you and Bob?" I ask again. Behind me, in the belly of the fighter jet, over a hundred Eternals and Lost Legion infantry wait to depart. Though technically, they're waiting for me to stop bickering with The Colonel. Corena, leaning against the wall, sighs and hits my shoulder, telling me to get away from the door so we can leave. Her and Boxer were among a few others ordered to Elpis with me and the Eternals.

"We will be fine. Now, I'm flattered by your concern, and I assure you that Bob is too, but you need to get going," The Colonel presses the button to close the doors. I stay in the way so the doors sense there's someone on the hatch and stay open. The Colonel gives me a look. I'm on her last nerve. "Montauk. Please."

I feel like a petulant child, but so much irrational, absurd stuff has happened to me anyways. I'm due for a good tantrum. "I've been with you since the beginning," I say. "So has Corena."

"Do not drag me into this," Corena says, pushing off the wall. She goes deeper into the ship to look for Boxer so he might talk some sense into me.

"You have," The Colonel says, "and I appreciate you. I consider you to be one of my friends, but you must consider the tactical benefits of going back to Elpis. Plus, Eternals need space to ascend. I don't want my men accidentally killing each other in these cramped halls."

"If you can trust a trigger happy marine barely old enough to fit in his armor to throw a grenade  _ in these cramped halls _ , you can trust Eternals to ascend."

She looks down at the floor, rubbing her temples. "I know you don't agree with this decision, and I know your heart's in the right place, but can you please—" She looks over at me, "— _ please _ , follow orders? I assure you this setup will be the most beneficial in the long run. We will stay here and capture the Eye, while you and these troops guard the vault."

I open my mouth to argue. The Colonel glares at me and I'm sure her eyes glow brighter.

"That is an order, Sergeant."

She wants me to follow orders. Like I have been for the latter half of my lifetime. I've been following orders blindly longer than I was living with my kid sister. I step off the doorway and into the ship, hands up in surrender. Fine.

"Aye-aye, Colonel."

If she detects the sarcasm in my tone she doesn't acknowledge it. The Colonel nods at me and hits the button, the massive loading bay doors puff steam and whir closed. The last I see of her is her head turning away from me, looking immensely tired.

"Done?" Corena asks behind me. I turn to find her and Boxer, both watching me with disappointment.

"What was the point of that?" Boxer asks. His discontent is not as harsh as Corena's.

I throw my hands, "This whole thing is stupid." I don't know what else to say, how else to articulate my emotions. This war, the vault, this Eternal thing, the way my life has flown completely off the rails, it's all so  _ stupid _ .

Corena leaves me and Boxer. He watches me shift on my feet. Angry and restless and unsure exactly  _ why _ . I hate what this life has done to me, what it's taken from me. It's like the wool has been lifted from my eyes. I'm lost, older than I was, and yet still in the same place I've been for years. Taking orders. Feeding something large and uncaring. I want to tear off my relics but can't find the will to do so.

"Sit with me," Boxer says. We sit on the hard plastic seats molded into the wall. He draws one leg up so he can face me. He asks me what's wrong. I almost laugh.

"I don't know. Everything?" I say, vision drifting up to the ceiling. I exhale, guilt seeping into my head. I shouldn't have talked to The Colonel like that, especially after she called me her friend. But a little voice in the back of my head tells me she only said that to get her dumb soldier to cooperate. "I'm just . . . I don't know."

My response doesn't settle with Boxer. He sets his hand on my leg, eyes roving my face for the answer to what haunts me. "Talk to me, Montauk."

"I am," I reply a bit too forcefully, and take a breath to calm down. "I don't know, really. It's just . . . I'm tired of everything, I think. Four and a half years since my life was any shred of normal. You were right about all this vault stuff, we shouldn't have messed with it."

"That's in the past," Boxer reminds me gently. "Think about what we can do now."

I don't know. I don't know where I'm going. Where I'll be stationed. How long until the vault opens or Jack and his mercs come and slaughter us as they did Best. What will become of The Colonel, and Bob, and Boxer's medic friends. I don't know anything and for the first time in a while, not knowing makes me writhe. Like I'm only now starting to fight against the current that's been dragging me to my death.

What can we do now? I've dug my grave, I've made my bed, now I have to lie in it. Accept that this is my life and I will meet my end on the battlefield like countless, countless others.

Boxer is still watching me, brow creased, tired eyes wreathed in bruise from not sleeping. He has so much more to worry about than my troubles.

"I want to help you," He says.

I hate seeing him like this. Stressed, exhausted, worked to the bone. Now he is burdened by my troubles, by my vices. I smile for him, I tell him he is helping. By being here, by caring, by sitting me down and bringing me back to my senses. He is not so easily convinced.

"When I know what's bothering me, I'll tell you," I say.

"Good. Because I'm here for you, you know that?"

I nod and tell him the same. He relaxes, leaning his head against the wall, eyes still locked on my face. He wrinkles his freckled nose as he smiles. I wish I could be more than I am for him.


	12. Abandoned

Corena swings her legs up onto the table, massaging Best's dog tags between her thumb and forefinger. The two metal plates rest on a chain around her neck, one with Best's information, the other with her forehead implants. The Pitchfork leans against the tent post behind her.

Our camp—Solitude's Edge—has been tense since The Colonel confirmed the vault hunters were back on Helios. What for, she couldn’t understand. It's been weeks since her last message. Radio silence says a thousand things.

We sit smack in the middle of Vorago Solitude, a far less habitable offshoot of Triton Flats. Plants are a rarity. Animals less so. All we have for company are the guardians, the canyons of slag, and the fissure, howling and spewing curtains of light. Maybe the howling is unique to Eternals. Boxer and Corena haven't complained about it and we sleep in the same tent.

"Do you talk to them?" Corena asks suddenly, looking at me over Best's tags.

I stare at her.

"The guardians."

Boxer snorts.

"No, I can't  _ talk  _ to them," I reply pointedly. "I don't even think they speak, just click."

"They click?"

"Yeah, they—" I gesture vaguely, "It's like a bat, or a cricket or something." I mimic the sound best I can with my tongue.

Corena chuckles. "So you do speak to them."

"I don't—whatever. Why? You want to ask them something? Hoping I'll put in a good word for you and you'll get a pretty scepter?"

Corena's eyes flash. "A scepter, I hadn't thought about that . . ." 

Boxer laughs just as his ECHO, sat in the center of the table, pings with an incoming com. I lean forward and flick it on. A voice I'd deliberately avoided in the last four years rumbles through the static.

"Troops," Lieutenant Colonel Avett booms, "I bring bad news." His voice is that clipped, raucous tone nearly all the top-brass Dahl soldiers have. I swear it's part of their training to sound like a hardass with a bone to pick with the world. "Our enemy has stormed Elpis. Our control of the battlefield wanes. Worse, your Colonel is dead."

Corena slides her legs off the table, staring at the ECHO like it's a bomb.

"Jack and his cadre of vault hunters stormed the Eye of Helios and killed Colonel Tungsteena Zarpedon."

My blood goes cold. Boxer makes a slight  _ oh  _ sound, eyes wide, staring at nothing, picturing it in his head.

"Other high-ranking officer casualties include: Corporal Sparks, Lieutenant Contreras, Corporal Bob . . ." He continues. I'm not listening. First Best. Now this. The Colonel and Bob, cut down.

"Shit . . ." Boxer breathes.

"They know the vault is open and they are coming to ruin our mission. Do not let that happen, troops. By the process of elimination, I am now the commanding officer of the Lost Legion. Do not abandon the mission laid out by The Colonel. Do not let them in the vault. Avett out." The ECHO goes dark. I stand, shoving my chair back. The air in the tent is suddenly stifling.

Stumbling outside, Boxer calls to me, I hear the news reach everyone else in the camp. A few others come out of their tents. We all wear the same wounded expression of lost, confused grief. We're all wondering what the hell happens now.

She's dead. The reason I stayed by. The reason I bothered with any of this vault business. She's gone. Same with Bob.

It seems all this vault has done is take from me. My face, my sleep, Best, The Colonel, Bob. In the end, what am I left with? Boxer and Corena, as shackled to this empty cause as I am. All destined to fight and die a war heavily out of our favor.

* * *

Like in the fissure, the camp has a set of floodlights that turn on during the "day" and off during the "night." I lie awake in my bunk, roving the ECHOnet. We didn't have access in the fissure, now that we do, I'm trying to catch up on all the news I missed out on. One thing I'm having trouble wrapping my head around is that Atlas vanished. Gone. Even their guns are disappearing all over the galaxy.

Which makes it frustratingly difficult to get a read on Promethea. Atlas all but owned the planet, and now that they vanished with the night, Promethea's down too. From what I can tell they don't have access to the net there. If my sister is still on that stupid planet, I can't contact her. If she's even still alive.

No.

She's fine. She's a fighter.

I glance out the thick window into the bleak camp. The Watcher has been absent since The Colonel died. I can't help but think that it's abandoned us. It knows we will split down the middle without The Colonel and it has left us to die on this moon. I lean back, close my eyes. I haven't slept in who knows how many weeks. Months maybe. Still, it's nice to rest in the dark and recharge.

The plastic floor creaks as someone enters. I open my eyes, filling the room with that electric, blue glow I'm still not used to. Boxer pads to my cot and sits on the end. Eyes distant and tired, brow creased with some internal battle.

"I can't sleep," he admits. I sit up. "First it was the dreams and now . . . it all keeps me up. I can't stop thinking about her daughter. What is going to happen to that poor kid?"

"I don't know," I say sympathetically.

Boxer shakes his head, glancing over at me, face washed blue from my eyes. He's as lost as the rest of us. Floating absently through a sea of grief. Like The Colonel left her daughter, like I left my sister, like Bob left his wife and kids, Boxer left his loved ones behind. And even now, he's thinking of others. Worried about someone else's family.

I reach out to him, touching his hand, bicep, shoulder. I pull him to me and he moves across the cot, resting his head on my shoulder, sighing as he does so. The weight is warm and comforting. He takes my hand, bringing it to rest on his chest. I feel his heart beating through the thin fabric. I lean back against the wall, his breath soon slows, eyes fluttering closed. He mumbles out a thank you and my stomach fills with a familiar warmth.

Is this love? This foreign, silent thing we've forged? It's  _ something _ . Something wrapped tighter around my heart than the relics. Something deeper than the vault's hold on me. The vault has me in a vice-like grip, suffocating me when I dare stray. Boxer is intertwined with me, a whole, complex person who sees me as the same. Who listens to my problems, comes to me with his. This trust is new and so incredibly filling. Two people, both with our own complexities and faults and paths, and yet here, we cross and create something whole and beautiful together. Despite everything, he is here, I am here.


	13. Here to Kill

"Does it ever stop itching?" Kenta asks me, scratching at her forearm through her fatigues. We patrol the camp, making sure everything is in order and nothing gets inside. Our patrols have doubled in the days since we lost The Colonel.

"You get used to it," I tell her, "and the scratching helps get some of the old skin off."

She makes a sound of disgust. I can't see her expression under the blank Eternal mask we both wear. Only our eyes shine out. Kenta takes the laser rifle off her belt, using its weight as a distraction. She still needs an O2 Kit, her condition not as progressed as mine or the others.

Not much has passed through Vorago Solitude since we set up camp. Occasionally one of the camps on the perimeter has to deal with the agitated locals, and sometimes the wildlife of Triton Flats will float its way to us, but other than that we've seen little action. It reminds me too much of our four-year vigil down in that pit. Except now I can see the stars, planets, and ships crossing above. It doesn't feel like as much of a change as I expected.

We pass under the catwalk connecting our camp to the dig site just before the vault. Boxer, leaning on the rails above, waves down at me as I pass by. I reciprocate.

The downtime has provided more opportunities for our camp to become a community, in a strange, desperate sense. It's easier to get to know everyone up here when we're all crammed together. I know everyone in my small camp by name. We share stories, eat our meals together, and all share the weight of protecting the universe from certain doom.

Boxer and I have more time together. I'm surprised after over four years of being in his way that he hasn't grown tired of me. And it seems I am always learning new things about him. He hums folk songs from Eden-6 while he works and hates it when I try to get him to sing the words for me. He snores despite his attempts to stop by sleeping on his stomach. Sometimes I catch him in deep thought, glaring off into middle distance, eyes sharp as if he's trying to extract meaning from the very space around him.

I am, evidently, not the most covert in my observing. I learned this when he outright confronted me about it, asking why I was watching him all the time instead of "doing my job" (my job being the useless task of patrolling the camp). That day I had to admit to him that I had trouble not thinking about or looking at him. This information he found incredibly amusing and, as he said himself, “really cute.”

"You aren't doing anything later, are you?" Kenta asks abruptly.

"Oh," I bite my lip, "I might have to check my calendar. Wouldn't want to miss out on sitting on my hands. I also have an appointment with the gate—I have to stare at it for a few hours." Kenta snorts. "Of course I'm not doing anything, what are you planning?"

"Some of the scouts and I are going to Tara's tent. She's organizing Artemis Hold 'Em, and  _ I  _ am going to win that statue from her."

Tara's tent is right by the eridian summoning stones. I wonder what they think of us, laughing and drinking and bickering into the night.

"The Hyperion hood ornament?" I laugh, thinking of the hand-sized metal statuette Tara shows off relentlessly.

"Who cares if it's a hood ornament? It looks valuable. I'm thinking I could melt it down and pawn off the bars, send the money to my folks on Hestias."

Hestias, like Promethea, is a planet ravaged by war. I wonder if she joined Dahl for the same reason I did, for the promise of a better life. Money to pay off debts and get off the stupid planet.

Kenta continues, "Pittman said he'd come by, but he hasn't answered his ECHO in, like, an hour."

"Aw, I miss the old man." He's a lieutenant colonel, three years past his promised retirement. He guards the Triton Flats connector but occasionally takes a moon buggy down to us. He'll groan about his bad legs and crow about the glory days during the Dahl corporate wars, when he was mowing down Atlas soldiers and not sitting on some moon waiting to die. He destroys all of us at poker. I lost three pistols and a legendary grenade mod to him.

"Right? I might have to get a Stingray and grab him."

"Not a Stingray," I laugh, "you'll kill him on that jumpy thing."

Kenta laughs with me, and for a moment I wish this war filibusters into oblivion so that I might stay at this camp with these people. We can play poker, laugh, sing, and tell stories. We can exist freely here as Eternals, away from the questioning and antagonistic eyes of the rest of the galaxy. 

She wipes a tear from under the mask, telling me about the time that she fell off a Stingray at a jump, falling into a canyon of lava. It nearly ate through her entire shield before help arrived. She pauses in the middle of relaying to me the dumbfounded look on her commanding officer's face when he found Kenta standing in the middle of a sea of lava. Her head twitches to the side. "You hear that?"

I hold my breath as the air buzzes with a mechanical whirring. Then I see it.

A flash of red zips by, tearing off the top of Kenta's head. The drone flashes past, firing more machine gun rounds. Hitting my armor, kicking up dirt. As I bolt back to the camp, I hear them laughing and shouting at me. The vault hunters have arrived.

I race through the camp, shouting warnings. Behind me, the six of them open fire. Two extra jeering voices are added to the chaos as the clones are activated. My blood is cold, lungs hot, limbs heavy. They killed The Colonel. They killed Bob. They're here to kill us.

A fusillade of bullets hails at me. One tears past the lightweight armor on my leg, through my calf. The flesh hisses, sizzling. Corrosion. I stumble behind a tent. It buckles inward as one of them fires a rocket into it. Flesh cooks under the heat of the projectile. They were sleeping.

I drag my busted leg behind tents, shoulder pressed to the wall of the Outfall Pumping Station for support. The pain makes my brain slow. My joints lock up from the shock. The vault whispers distantly to me. If I don't ascend soon, I'm meat. Already I hear some of the others taking to the sky. Weapons are primed, orders shouted. It's all in vain. They're eating us alive.

"Six!" One of them cries, by the accent, I'm guessing it's The Baroness. "Do keep up, Wilhelm. You're lagging."

A synthesized voice grunts. "I'm not doing shit."

"Clearly." Another one drawls, followed by the boom of a Jakobs shotgun. "I've got five. Best that, big man."

"You're only doing this to impress the boss."

"So?" A hail of laughter. "Afraid of a little competition?"

My legs are shaking so much it's a miracle I'm even standing. I can see my tent ahead. Just a few more steps. The vault hunters continue to joke and jeer like this is just another job for them. Maybe it is.

Boxer bursts through the tent, Corena in tow. They notice me barely holding myself up. I'm dragging something behind, can't tell if it even looks like a foot anymore. Boxer and Corena run to me, but their attention is with our falling camp.

"Got three here," that mechanized voice again. I turn to see Wilhelm, crouched on one knee, drones on cooldown, a rocket launcher over his shoulder.

"Doesn't count if they're still alive, tin can!" Nisha Kadam shouts back. Wilhelm just raises the launcher and grins.

I am pulled off my feet. Energy swells in my chest and I look to the stars, my pain forgotten. Ancient power races through my bones, rattling my teeth, squeezing to get past my eyes. It echoes in my lungs, boiling the marrow of my bones, tightening my tendons, pulling my veins taut.

I fall, but my feet do not find the ground.

A sphere of crackling electricity surrounds me, keeping me aloft. I am the storm. The Enforcer was unfortunate enough to be in my field. He takes off in the other direction, shield fried.

Corena and Boxer managed to jump away just in time. Boxer stares up at me like I will fall apart. I might. I know what the vault wants from me. It pumps through my veins. It wants me to fight, to protect. But I do not. Corena shares a few words with Boxer that I can't hear over the sizzling of my energy field. She enters the fray. Boxer gives me a parting glance that says too much before reluctantly following her, powering up his Res-Gun. This must be how he feels. Caught between what everyone wants him to do and what he must to keep us alive. I'm dragged back into the battle when a bullet screams past my head.

"Uh, that was a . . . warning shot!" The Baroness is perched on the top of a Legion structure, picking us off. I duck out of the way before she can get another shot at me. Nearby, I hear the return fire of a Dahl sniper.

We're spread thin. Our camp is smaller than it once was—a handful of people up and left upon hearing of The Colonel's death. We're low on guns, manpower, and directive. The vault hunters make easy work of us. They command the battlefield like it was constructed around them. Even the little CL4P-TP unit is helping. I watch helplessly as the steward robot puts my peers into the ground with fire from an automatic weapon as big as him.

Tara stands outside her tent, geared up inside a shield bubble. She exchanges fire with the body double. He digistructs his clones and scurries off to attack the opposite tent. The clones deplete the shield. A shot from one of them and Tara pitches back, legs folding under her as she collapses into the tent. A righteous rage fills me and I chase the body double. The energy field kicks up small rocks and debris around me as I tear across the camp.

I pass Corena, still exchanging fire with the Baroness. She nods at me, fires the Pitchfork, and I hear a drone as the Baroness loses her shield. She ducks behind cover before Corena can finish the job.

It is now that I notice movement by the archway. I throw a glance over my head to find a growing horde of Hyperion loader bots entering the fray. They carry guns and deadpan orders to each other. They're weak, made for maintenance, augmented for war. The marines tear them down faster than they can enter. I push on.

Athena, the ex-Atlas assassin, fights alongside the body double. Around the two is a corona of death, weapons, and bullet holes. They stand under the catwalk. Athena twists, glowing shield blocking gunfire on one side. She spears an Eternal straight through with her sword, cutting them from the sternum down. Droplets of blood float slowly to the ground in the lackadaisical gravity.

Boxer kneels behind a cargo crate, sidearm in hand, Res-Gun on his belt. He fires at the body double, who grunts and fades into a flash of light. One of the clones. He curses and ducks down to reload. Athena sees this and charges him, shield arm winding back to throw it at first sight of him. I breeze past the crates, summoning what strength I have to keep going. Athena sees me and doubles back, catlike reflexes keeping her balanced and aware of her surroundings. But with marines firing into her on one side and me on the other, she has nowhere to run.

I move toward her, feeling the mighty wrath of a long-buried civilization in my bones. She looks past me and smiles.

"You might want to turn around," She offers smugly. I do.

It's Wilhelm. He winks at me and fires his launcher. The massive projectile takes me back, shield whining as it depletes. I'm flung across the camp. The energy around me flickers and dies as I tumble across the packed dirt. I come to rest beneath the gate at the front of the camp. Limbs numb, something surely broken. The vault's power has left. In its wake grows an infinitely heavy emptiness.

To my right, the entire moon stretches out to the horizon. To my left, the vault hunters grow nearer to the vault. We were the last defense before the fissure. They tore us down and they're going to open the vault. Fighter jets rip above, searing over the moon's surface. A desperate play by Avett to keep them out. I've seen what the vault hunters are capable of. Our jets won't stop them. Not even RK-5 and our best fighter pilot. They'll liquefy the ship before it can get a single volley off.

Boxer and Corena scramble to my aid. Boxer slides the mask off my face. It bumps against a bruise on my cheekbone. He's kneeled over me, fear of death in his eyes. I pull my arm up to grip his, to assure him I'm okay. A relieved smile splits his face while the Res-Gun works on my flesh wounds.

Corena kneels off to the side, drawing her gun up. She levels the Pitchfork at their heads. They wouldn't notice, their backs to us, thinking me dead.

I grab the barrel, pull it down. Corena stares at me. One of her goggles was shot off. The edges jagged, one eye exposed, blood dotting her brow bone.

"We can leave," I spit between shaking lips. She looks to the rest of Vorago Solitude. "If you shoot . . . they will kill us."

Corena glares at the vault hunters, harboring weeks of festering rage following Best's death. She lets it go, hands dropping from the gun. "Yeah," She says wearily, "let's get out of here."


	14. To The Last

The vault hunters round the corner, entering the building that will lead them to the fissure and countless other Legion forces where they will tear through us like paper. I have little faith in the Legion I once trusted my life with. Corena and Boxer help me stand and we leave the camp, stepping over the singed corpses of loader bots and marines.

There is nothing left.

We pass through camps once packed with soldiers reduced to graveyards. Husks of tents and buildings smoke into the thin atmosphere, corpses lay bleeding in oxygen generators. Guns and spent munitions litter the ground. I kick one as we stumble through, a severed hand still curled around the handle.

This is it. What we have been fighting for. I haven't seen losses like this in my life. We are few among the survivors. Banners and ripped clothing flutter in the low gravity, stained or scorched or full of holes. All pawns in some war bigger than us, bigger than humanity. Whatever The Watcher wanted, I hope it's happy, because we lost everything. We looked into the void and found only desolation and ruin. Our leaders killed, ranks slaughtered. Left to rot on an unfamiliar moon for a cause bigger and older than all of us.

The hill just before Triton Flats gives us some trouble. My legs are unsteady and putting too much pressure on my right foot sends pain lacing through my thigh. We take longer to climb up, hobbling along like a six-legged dread beast.

We reach the top, stopping at a small camp. More bodies strewn about to greet us. Blood steams on a lake of liquid nitrogen, helmets lie cracked, guns abandoned. Corena stops dead, tugging Boxer and me. I follow her eyes.

Pittman sits in the doorway of the building, clutching his stomach, armor askew. He calls us over with a grunt. Boxer steadies me against a support beam while Corena takes to Pittman's side.

" 'Bout time," Pittman spits blood on the hard plastic flooring. Corena crouches and tries to assess his wounds. He growls and scoots away. "Ah, no. Hurts like a bitch. I don't want you messing with it."

Corena frowns. Boxer holds my shattered fingers in his own, trying to set them right. I ignore the pain, focusing on Corena and Pittman.

" " _ If it took more than one shot, you weren't using a Jakobs, _ " " Pittman laughs at some private joke. "Not on me." He coughs up more blood. "Seems Zarpedon got the best of it. Out with a bang, while I'm here bleeding out, colder than a bullymong's backside," He bares his teeth in something that once was a smile. "You see that smug, floating bitch with the wings and the—the . . . Whatever. If you see it, do me a favor: punch it."

Corena laughs in spite of herself. Pittman tries to. Doesn't quite come out right. He pauses and his eyes drift down to Corena's sidearm.

"I have a favor to ask," He swallows. "I've done what I can for this war. It's time for me to go. Will you do me a kindness and put this old dog out of his misery?" He tries again to muster a smile. Again it twists with pain.

Boxer squeezes my wrist without thinking, watching Corena pull the slide back on her sidearm. I shift, pulling him with me so he faces me instead of Pittman. I don't have any comfort to offer him; no words can make this better than it is. He looks at me, eyes wide and confused, surrounded by so much senseless violence and pointless loss. Boxer leans into me, burying his face in my shoulder. I bring my good arm around his back. Corena looks back at me one last time. I nod at her. She nods back. Our silent language of understanding.

It's clean. A single shot to the head. Corena lays him flat and closes his eyes, hovering over him for a moment. She picks up his rifle and sets it across his chest.

We emerge beneath a building in Triton Flats. The vault hunters’ abandoned moon buggy sits as if waiting for us. Just beyond the damp alcove, scavs shout and shoot at the local wildlife. The powers of the vault are about to be unleashed and life carries on like always.

Corena takes the driver’s seat as Boxer straps me in next to her. He takes the turret.

"Where to?" I mumble.

"I need a drink."

"Montauk needs a surgeon," Boxer adds.

Corena hits a button and the buggy sputters to life. "I think I know of a place."

* * *

The "place" Corena knows of is a massively tall egg-crate city called Concordia. Reportedly, it's the only real city on the entire moon. From what I've seen of Elpis, I don't doubt that for a second.

We stumble through immigration and customs. I'm exhausted, shattered bones aching like hell, and I've bruised enough of my spine that it hurts to tilt my head. Corena and Boxer are barely in better shape. She waves her sidearm at a bumbling steward bot until it shows us to the town's medic. We must be a sight. I doubt the civilians here in this protected paradise have seen much of the war on Elpis, much less an Eternal in person.

The infirmary is a box tightly packed with crates, cots, vending machines, and cobbled together medical equipment. In the middle of it all is a compact, craggy-faced woman with braids spun on the sides of her head. She scrutinizes us as we nearly trip down the stairs into her infirmary.

"You need help? Come," She beckons, accent thick, but not an Elpis native. It's a different lilt, a different planet. "Am Nurse Nina. I will heal you good." Nina accepts me from Boxer and Corena, who slink off to lean against the wall and counter for support.

I lie back on a cot stinking of urine and cheap air freshener. Nina snaps on a pair of examination gloves and gets to poking and prodding my weathered bones. I grit my teeth when she jerks my arm to the side to get a better look. Her eyes smile at me over the paper mask.

"You are from Dahl," She observes. Corena's hand drifts to her gun. Boxer eyes the door. "I was once. I wore too-tight armor and played with their fancy toys. Pah. Spat Nina right out."

She grabs my chin, twisting my face to the side. The pain in my neck blossoms to my jaw and the back of my skull. I groan and Nina shushes me like one would a child. "You are special case. What is this? Radiation? Slag?"

"It's not the, ah, burns we're worried about," Boxer starts.

"His bones are broken," Corena says harshly "He was flung four meters. Look at his fingers."

Nina tuts. "I see that. You bring patient like this into my shop and get mad when I ask questions? Not good for business." With the nonchalance one would discard a piece of trash, she sets my shoulder into its socket. It pops with a flash of pain, then gradual, liquid relief. "I can fix the bones. You two need Health." She jams a stubby finger at the vending machine with her face on it. "But . . ."

Corena pauses mid-step towards the vending machine. "But?"

Nina shrugs, turning and grabbing equipment from boxes and out of drawers. "You are Lost Legion, yes? The people here will not be happy to see you. I do not mind, but others will."

"Others?" Boxer asks.

Suddenly Nina laughs. "You do not know? The vault hunters sleep here, in Concordia."


	15. Off This Moon

Nina lived up to her promise and did, in fact, patch me up good. A few days of bed rest with some physical therapy, hidden with Corena and Boxer in a Concordia rental and I'm back to full health. The operation cost nearly all our pooled savings. We don't have enough to keep living in this city. Corena is trying to get a job from the bounty board. Boxer and I are more intent on finding a way off the moon.

It's strange being away from the Legion. A freedom I am unacquainted with. The days are unstructured and lazy—the vault hunters haven't been back to Concordia since we showed up so we don't have to flee for our lives again. Granted, we're all still on edge, but also enjoying our limited days of peace. We've all earned it.

I am free of the Lost Legion, years free of Dahl, but the vault hangs around my neck, in my bones. Our armor became too heavy and cumbersome and we sold most of it for food and rent. Yet I'm still wreathed in relics and bones. I have to keep the mask near me or I go into a spiraling panic. It's how I imagined a heart attack but of the mind. Slowly, then all at once, I'm consumed by a tidal wave of frantic frenzy before it is in my hands or by my side again.

Boxer lies on the futon with me, legs stretched across my lap, Corena curled in the chair across from us. I hold the mask in my off hand, feeling the grooves in the dense material. I dangle it off the armrest. The sight of it, precarious in the air, sets my nerves on fire. My fingers clench around the curved edge of the mask. I hate that I am like this. That the vault has built itself into my psyche. I don't want this anymore. I don't want any of this. I don't want the relics, I don't want to ascend, I don't want the glowing eyes, the purple rashes, the lack of sleep—any of it.

I hold it higher above the ground. Experimental. It takes a few seconds to calm my breathing. Corena flips through her book. Boxer mutters as he browses the ECHOnet on his busted device.

Take the plunge. Take back control.

I drop the mask. It clatters to the floor, splitting in two. My whole body jerks. Boxer startles, swinging his legs to the ground, asking me if I'm okay.

It's so  _ wrong _ . I bite my tongue to keep back a groan. It's like I've lost a limb. An immense weight lifted and part of myself, gone.

_ It's not me _ , I remind myself.

"I'm good," I assure them, not sure if it’s true. Corena watches me curiously over the top of her book. Boxer's trying to catch my eye. I can't stop staring at the shattered mask. I'm torn in half.  _ I did that _ . Power, like I've never felt, fills my chest. Personal autonomy. I am not a servant of the vault any longer. Yet my heart screams seeing the mask broken and discarded on the ground.

Corena eyes it. "Finally," She says with a smile.

Boxer puts his hand on my arm, steadying me. I lean my head toward him in gratitude and he takes my jaw in his hand. I still can't fathom how the rough, papery violet skin there doesn't bother him.

"I . . . didn't think I could do that," I admit. I look at the other relics on my person, a resigned tired dragging my bones down. Soon. Soon I will be rid of all of them, but the drive has left me. I sink back into the cushions, Boxer coming with me. "I'm ready to put this vault shit behind us."

"You know what this calls for?" Corena asks with a grand smile, setting her book down. "A drink."

"You've been trying to get us to go to that bar for days," Boxer groans.

"Which makes this the perfect occasion. We can't stay here forever."

"You sound like Best."

Corena pauses, gaze softening. "Thank you," She says suddenly, "I think she brought out the best in me. I'm trying to reflect that more."

I glance over at Boxer, who offers Corena a smile. "I'm sold on that drink."

* * *

The Up Over Bar is the most well-maintained joint I've seen on this planet. It has tables, chairs, and a roof, which is more than what can be said for nearly everywhere else on Elpis. Bass rattles the floor through massive speakers, a smoky haze wreaths the floor, and Concordia citizens mixed with drifters fill the interior with ambient chatter. Posters over posters line the walls, advertising bands, bounties, and other shops. The freshest posters advertise the bar itself, which is on a closing sale. Apparently, the owner is packing up and moving back to Pandora, which, in and of itself, is a misnomer. Elpis may be a festering blister on this galaxy, but it is far better than anything Pandora has to offer.

Boxer, Corena, and I look like a pack of drifters. We fit right in. I'm covered head to toe, wrapped in sashes and mismatched cloth, with a mask and goggles wrapped around my head. The whole ensemble is hot and a lot of dead weight, but it's necessary for me to go anywhere without looking like I took a bath in slag.

Corena and Boxer wear what passes for casual on the moon, which means a windbreaker and work pants accessorized with combat gear and holsters, also a bandana around their foreheads to conceal the Dahl implants. Our kind isn't exactly welcome here.

Quietly and casually as possible so as to not gather unwanted attention, the three of us slip into a booth in the corner. Boxer cranes his neck to look out the window, taking in the sheer verticality of the city while Corena eyes a bounty board. I sit and watch the other patrons. Some sit in groups, some alone. A woman sits at an empty table, an ECHO in front of her. She chews a nail and notices me. I give her a polite nod and look away.

The barkeep—and owner if the posters in the front are to be believed—swings by. She is instantly enamored with Corena. Her painted face glows with a smile, flashing dazzling white teeth. Her overzealous flirtation has little effect on my thoroughly jaded friend. She wipes our table down with a rag, leaning forward and exposing a generous amount of cleavage. "I didn't know there were cuties like you on this side of the moon," she purrs.

"We are just passing through," Corena replies curtly.

"Ah, to where?"

Corena gives her a look and she backs down, hands up.

"Keep your secrets. I always love the mysterious ones. There's something so alluring about a hidden past," She sighs contentedly, clearly trying to get a reaction out of Corena. When it doesn't come, she falls back on routine, taking our orders. When she saunters away, she passes the lone woman at the table, who shifts. She's wearing a Dahl legion jacket. Our legion. The Lost Legion before it was lost. I nudge Boxer's arm and tilt my head at her.

"She could have scavenged it off the Drakensburg," Corena whispers.

"In that good condition? She had to get it right from the source. I'm going to talk to her."

"What? No," Boxer grabs my shirtsleeve.

Corena agrees with him, "We came here to keep a low profile, get drinks, and leave."

"I just want to talk to her. If she's from the Legion, she'll be sympathetic and maybe get us out of this awful moon."

"And if she isn't, she might blow your head off."

I stand, "Then it's good I'm wearing a helmet. Give me five minutes."

Corena tosses her head back with a groan. "Fine, but we're coming with."

We shove away from the booth and tread down a short set of stairs to the woman’s table. She glances up at us as we sit around her, confused, eyes narrowing. Before she can ask questions, Corena pulls the top of her bandana up, revealing her implants. The woman nods tightly, tucking a strand of short blonde hair behind her ear. She eyes each of us, searching for weapons.

She is easily the most put-together person in this bar. Short hair held up around her face, clothes washed—her shirt even looks ironed—and she doesn't smell like watered-down booze. The cuffs of her jacket are hemmed, the stitches looking hand administered.

"You're with the Lost Legion?" She asks in a low voice, still taken aback by our appearances. Corena replies affirmatively and asks her where she got the jacket. The woman flushes, "Oh this? This was my mother's."

"She served?" Boxer asks.

"She was The Colonel," The woman admits, and now I see the resemblance. Same grand posture, same wide eyes.

"Britannia," I whisper. Her eyes snap to me, trying to find purchase on my featureless mask and blank goggles. "She told me about you, that you were here on Elpis . . ."

"I hadn't seen her in years, then I got word that she died," Britannia explains, tracing the ECHOdevice with her fingers. "I knew it would happen, but . . . I mean, it's different when it happens, you know?"

"Absolutely," Corena replies instantly. 

"You were with her all that time . . ."

I nod. "She was a friend."

Britannia pauses, staring at the table, having some internal conversation with herself. She lifts her head and meets Corena's gaze. "I was about to leave this stupid moon. Do you want a ride off? In exchange, you can tell me stories about my mother."

Boxer and Corena exchange a glance. "When do we leave?"

The daughter of The Colonel smiles, stands, and drops a few bills on the table. "How about now? I have a ship waiting at the Concordia docks."

A grin bursts through Corena's stoicism. "Give us ten minutes to get our things."

"Alright," Britannia returns the smile, snapping the ECHOdevice to her belt. "Let's get the hell off this moon."

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even like the Lost Legion and Zarpedon that much I have no idea how this happened


End file.
